Longing: Poems of a Life: Study and Discussion Guide

In Longing: Poems of a Life, author Merle Feld addresses readers by sharing rich and complex life experiences. Feld believes her poetry will resonate with readers by giving a voice to their own moments of joy, trauma, soul stretching, loss, and wonder. Feld hopes they will feel enlivened, deepened, challenged, and gifted by poems that open moments they have never known. These poems speak to the widest human audience. 

As poems emerged in writing this book, Feld found that they seemed to distribute themselves into seven themes, yielding the seven sections of the book. Within each section, the poems build upon one another and are in conversation. Each section also reverberates with the whole, perhaps a bit like the way midrashim (layers of Biblical commentary) echo, enrich, and complicate a story over time. In the introduction to Longing: Poems of a Life, Feld urges her readers to read the book straight through, in order, rather than jumping from section to section, to allow the poems to build. 

There are several approaches to using this study guide, also written by Feld. It can be used for a book group selection, for a synagogue, campus club, or chavurah circle, in chavruta with a close trusted friend, or for solo personal writing. The guide begins with general questions on the book as a whole and then provides prompts focused on each section. Some questions may be better suited to group discussion and others to personal reflection. You might select a few poems from different sections that seem to jump out, demand your attention, and just sit with those. Or you might find it most fruitful to focus on one section at a time, choosing to explore deeply with other readers or in solitude.

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