Love Nailed To The Doorpost

In Love Nailed to the Doorpost, Richard Chess offers poems and lyrical prose inspired and informed equally by the pleasures and pressures of everyday life and by sacred and secular texts ranging from Torah to Basho to Robert Creeley. This new work transports us from the biblical past to the present, from creation stories to stories of brotherly struggle to meditations on married and family love.

Love—that’s the thing, whether spontaneously arising or commanded, as it is, the commandment to love inscribed on parchment, rolled up and tucked into a small case, a mezuzah, and nailed to the doorpost of the house. You shall love: the challenges of fulfilling that commandment, and the joy and transformation one experiences when one does: that’s what Chess’s powerful new work explores.