The Shortest Skirt in Shul

Advance Praise

Linguistically inventive and agile, this collection includes lactating patriarchs, a skin of rainbow scales, the bible of wanderlust, short skirts and shaatnez, pigs and Torah scrolls, and all the trans yearnings between the lily and the rose. As playful as it is profound, Sass Orol’s The Shortest Skirt in Shul is an exciting addition to your poetry bookshelf.

– R. B. Lemberg, author, The Four Profound Weaves  and Everything Thaws (forthcoming)

Sass Orol’s collection The Shortest Skirt in Shul glories in what is broken, circumscribed, and severed. Corpses at a body farm become tokens of love and reverence. The slaughter of Egypt’s first-born sons transforms into a strange affirmation for the trans speaker in “Daughter of Egypt.” “All bodies are mistranslated prophecies,” Orol writes, and humans are “tiny clay jars … filled with too much light.” Their poems grapple with the divine, with language, and with cultures that would trap us in genders and bodies others chose for us. For Orol, these are not only tragedies, but also invitations to craft
something better.  “Not everything can be fixed,” their poems remind us, but “if you don’t like the shape, / everything can be cut further.” Sure enough, this collection is a series of cuts, deep, precise, and joyous.

– Izzy Wasserstein, author of When Creation Falls

Sass Orol’s debut collection enacts its own beautiful & terrifying vision of the power of language (or liturgy, or prayer, or poetry): “[A] prayer cannot sit in a sealed jar        and remain a prayer / It needs to oxidize to be … smashed against a wall      tossed like a match / where it will catch fire and burn the wall down / It will burn the entire Holy City with it.” Like the forest fire which enables the giant sequoia to reproduce, the poems in The Shortest Skirt in Shul are a sacred burning, an incandescence in which ancient stories sprout into their new, luminous incarnations. These poems exuberantly explore gender, Torah, the masks we wear, and the way our bodies (and the ways we wear them) at once threaten stable narratives, and offer the kind of liberation that saves our lives. “Transition,” writes Orol, “is a recognition of the oldest shapes.” Reading these poems, we are transformed, we are awakened; we are newborns, recognizing within ourselves the very ancient stories we contain.

– Alicia Jo Rabins, author of Divinity School, composer of Girls In Trouble