tkhines, by Eve Bernfeld

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. tkhine (Yiddish): supplication תחנה t-ch-een-ah (where the ch-sound is the same guttural sound as in challah and Chanukkah) When she learned about tkhines, the nearly-lost tradition of Ashkenazi Jewish “women’s” prayers, Eve Bernfeld gave herself the assignment to write one a day. Over the course of three seasons, the supplications poured out, scraps of text calling for help from the ineffable to make it through the sacred grind of everyday life. The ordinary exhaustion of parenthood—slicing onions for family dinners, being woken at 3 am for nightmares and nosebleeds, packing snacks for baseball games—gives rise to an altered state of consciousness, threaded through with magic, fairy tales and bursts of joy from the natural world. The tkhines in this chapbook lie at the intersection of poem, prayer and spell. Eve Bernfeld is a writer, theatre artist, teacher and mother living in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA in Applied Theatre from Emerson College and her work has been published by Cathexis NW Press, Howlround Theatre Commons, AmSAT Journal, Northern Lights and more. Her writing has won awards from Mouritz Press and the American Alliance for Theatre & Education. These poems were created during her time as an Art/Lab PDX Fellow.