Praise for The Living Room, Rearranged:

In The Living Room Rearranged, Yael Grunseit audaciously reframes Rabbinic Talmudic text and inserts a young woman’s experiences of sexuality and desire. Her prose and poetry is brave and unflinching as she invites us into the personal and particular juxtaposed against ancient Rabbinic teachings and warnings about the danger of a woman’s desire. She challenges the reader like her character Liv challenges her to acknowledge that “strength is honesty, just hold the whole of me.” Like a tender book of wisdom, we are asked to hold the other side of what is not written, the other side that Grunseit dares to write, rearranging not only rabbinic texts, but our view of Jewish female sexuality, desire, gender exploration, the way a woman lives within ancient and contemporary male scripted tradition. 

—Sarah Sassoon, author of This is Why We Don’t Look Back and Shoham’s Bangle

At once exorcism, liturgy, palimpsest, and cantillation, in The Living Room, Rearranged, poet Yael Grunseit weaves a wild and powerful tapestry that takes memory and tradition by the shoulders and shakes it. Grunseit uses sections of the Hebrew Torah and inserts her own prose poetry and free verse, exploring Talmudic themes of desire, reception, and forgiveness with humor and poignancy, Playing with the page to great effect, Grunseit recreates and interprets her experiences of sexuality and Judaism in a carnival funhouse of religious dogma, irony, humor, shame, and redemption. At odds with her religious upbringing, there is a yearning for belonging threaded throughout the collection, but ultimately, the yearning is for truth. “No matter how much we rearrange the living room,” Grunseit writes, “we both know all that happened.”

—Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds