My name is Padre Gotuma and I grew up in a very particular religious tradition, Irish Catholicism,

and I'm not sure if I can blame other people for this or just my own Eurosis, but I think I always was worried that I didn't have the right answer to questions of religion.

And my life was changed when I started to learn how to read the Bible in the company of Jews, who were saying to me,

there isn't only just one answer to one question, there's multiple answers to multiple questions and you need to find a way to hold multiple things together as possibilities of interpretation and truth at the same time.

2 a.m. and the rabbinical students stand in their bathrobes by Yehoshua November.

2 a.m. and the rabbinical students stand in their bathrobes at the edge of the Yehoshiva parking lot, watching the practiced motions of muscular firemen disembarking from their engine.

Soon it will be determined the youngest student in the building pulled the basement alarm, after learning over the dormitory payphone, his parents back in Baltimore,

intend to end their 19 year marriage before Passover.

The only one the rabbis have not accounted for, crouches in his closet behind a roll of black sports coats.

And because the Yehoshiva caters to souls but also bodies, the early morning mysticism class on why the divine presence cannot dwell amongst those plagued by sadness has been cancelled.

So this poem of Yehoshua November is a really tender poem filled with story and filled with what you'd call in poetry, furniture.

If a poem is a room, then a poem always is filled with furniture in the room, things that are happening, things you can see, things you can feel, emotions even.

And the story in the poem is straightforward. It's 2 a.m. there's firemen and an emptied Yehoshiva, a seminary for Jewish students, and there is a fire alarm and the desire to find out what's happened.

And there of course is the interrupted night, everybody's out in those bathrobes. And there's the worry about whether they'll be able to get back in, there's the interrupted schedule, and the unfolding story.

The next morning's plans are changed. And then there's the backstory to this particular student and his anxiety and his hiding behind the sports coats in the closet and the story of his parents too.

It's a poem that's full of characters, it's really short, but it's a very well-populated poem.

Just as a list of the characters, there's the rabbinical students and the muscular firemen, the youngest student, and then there's the youngest student's parents as well, back in Baltimore.

And there's the rabbis who are trying to account for all the students. And then there's whoever it is, whether it's a rabbi or somebody else who makes the decisions about the class the next morning.

This is a poem mostly about men, although there is the mother of the distressed student mentioned quietly in the poem. And so that's a real particular part of an experience in this Shishiva, that is powerful in this poem.

Yes, on November is a Chesitic Jew, and so the poems in this particular collection anyway, center around religious culture, there is a really powerful presence of American Chesitic Jewish experience that's brought to the forefront in so many of these poems.

Stories about family, stories about study, stories about text, stories about God, stories about seminary. So as well as this being a poem that's set in a predominantly male experience of 2am in this particular seminary with this particular experience, it's also a poem about tenderness and a poem about change.

There's the students' distress, there's the students' fear, the student perhaps doesn't know how to give voice to his own distress, he doesn't know how to sound his own alarm, so he sounds another alarm, a literal alarm, an alarm that causes everybody to be evacuated from a building.

...