Secular Audacity
Mayapple Press, 2025


Joy Gaines-Friedler’s holiness is her abundant empathy, from her parents’ mortality to the horrors of October 7. This poet knows tragedy, yet, “unlike the pious whose precepts prevent disbelief,” she will preserve the bruised apples by cutting away “their damage.” Yes: secular audacity—everywhere present in this collection of old-fashioned Jewish chutzpah.

—Philip Terman, author of  The Whole Mispocha