Nothing Is for Everyone

Nothing Is for Everyone

A wise and energizing book of poems suffused with music, mysticism, tenderness, and wit. Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is a manifesto of the unmanifest. Deeply, devotedly hybrid in influence and expression, this wild collection of poetry draws on rabbinic linguistics and kabbalistic meditation, free jazz and hip-hop, Marcel Duchamp and the Magid of Mezritch—all to reveal the permutational quality of language itself: its instability, resistance to containment, and divine fault lines. In these times when answers are plentiful and questions impoverished, Pearlstein’s insistence on the materiality of nothingness reveals that in fact nothing really matters.  Nothing Is for Everyone was published by Deuteronomy Press and is distributed by Ayin Press (via Publishers Group West).  “With a post-bop-and-beat eloquence and a disarming, instructive largesse, Eden Pearlstein sings us toward that ‘tunnel / at the end / of the light’ through the nothing that’s everything for those who can hear it. This is a wise and energizing debut collection.” — Peter Cole , author of Draw Me After: Poems “Eden Pearlstein's wonderful Nothing Is for Everyone lives up to its provocative title. You could read it as the answer to a Buddhist koan or as a surrealist sales pitch, you could read it with a sigh, or with laughter and applause. What is nothing? Who is everyone? Pearlstein's images and poems walk lightly on the earth, in the company of ‘memory and myth, ritual and art,’ dancing and touching home again and again, gently urging us all: ‘For God's sake / make things / more beautiful // Than they were / before you got / here—then // Vanish. / Anything else is / trespassing.’” — Alicia Ostriker , author of The Volcano and After: Selected and New Poems 2002–2019 “This book is an infinity mirror. A reflection of the reflection. I see everyone in the writing, different. I see different in the writing, everyone.” — Cannupa Hanska Luger , artist/author of  Future Ancestral Technologies “One gets the sense from accompanying the wandering lines of this book that one has violated something ancient and sacred just by reading it. And yet, right there in the dimly lit room of the book's unfurling, the composer himself smiles seductively, through alchemical lines too fugitive for common sense—as if to encourage us to stray. So I did. I read it all up. And now I'm lost . The view has never been finer!” — Báyò Akómoláfé, PhD , author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home “In the tradition of holy trickster–poets like Christopher Smart, Rebbe Nachman of Breslav, and the great kabbalists, these poems knit together the realm of kaleidoscopic fantasy and the doughy academy of the body. Using language as a candle to illuminate his way, Pearlstein interrogates the boundaries between human and divine, carrying on an ancient tradition of midrashic commentary, unearthing something deep and true about our life on earth: ‘God’s greenglasshouse / That dark fragile tower / Only built to fall.’” — Alicia Jo Rabins , author of Fruit Geode and Divinity School “From the impish, ecstatic wordplay embedded in the title, all the way to the alliterative Ars Poetica em-dashed into the final line, Nothing Is for Everyone is not just brimming with a deep sense of the music of language: better, perhaps, to say that it is tapped directly into language’s musicvein. Mystical and melodic, weird and winking, reverent and rebellious, profane and profound, these poems are at once a yawp, a playground and a supplication.” — Moriel Rothman-Zecher , author of Before All the World and Sadness Is a White Bird “In his soulfully singular voice, Eden Pearlstein keeps it light and playful, while remaining ever-mindful of the depths and paradoxes.” — Rodger Kamenetz , author of The Missing Jew: Poems 1976–2022 “Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is soaked in the imagery of kabbalah and nondual consciousness—mystical and timeless, yet somehow relevant to walking down the street. The poems draw us in but never quite resolve into simple narrative (much like the world around us). There is something pointillist about these poems, something atomic that breaks down consciousness into its component parts, ‘every piece a puzzle unto itself.’ These careful and potent observations from a modern kabbalist’s notebook offer a slant on Jewish theology that embraces the particular while dissolving into the cosmic; brilliantly directing us toward the nothing that is so deeply, specifically and gloriously—us.” — Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD , author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams “If prose tells a story, poetry pokes holes in the plot. Don’t think! Imagine! Don’t explain! Rupture! In this potent collection of poems, Eden Pearlstein lures us into a cavernous space of images: fire, shadow, womb, name, spark, prayer, archetype, insanity. These poems don’t let you rest, but as you continue to re