Night Breaks in the Garret by Yermiyahu Ahron Taub

A tightly focused collection of poems and mini essays that reflect on what it means to be loved and accepted and how that can shift and change over time

Yermiyahu Ahron Taub’s Night Breaks in the Garret is a significant exploration that deeply mines the poet’s personal life, including fluid ideas about identity and belonging across faith, cultural, and social communities. Probing self-reflection, creative expression, and painful memories are juxtaposed with moments of beauty, joy, and love in this hybrid collection.

Taub’s care and precision is evident; reading Night Breaks in the Garret feels like it’s an honor to do so. These pieces should be held and considered tenderly, as they’ve been written. This isn’t a book to be raced through or skimmed; like walking instead of driving, taking your time with Night Breaks in the Garret lets you notice all the small details that reflect shades of meaning and experience.

As a whole, the poems and essays reflect a lifelong journey that’s loosely based on Taub’s own experiences as a gay Jewish man and all the growing pains that go along with coming of age in different ways. Reconnecting with an old teacher, reminiscing with a former lover, and even revisiting a childhood memory where a favorite toy was marred elicit strong emotional reactions when none of these quite go as expected. Taub doesn’t shy away from sharing what he’s feeling, whether that’s apprehension, sadness, regret, anger, or happiness. The immediacy of Taub’s writing style means we feel those emotions, too.

Frequent references to garrets provide a through-line that highlights how Taub feels part of but still apart from others, much like the attic space is distant from the rest of a family’s daily living space in the same house. He has an insider’s perspective and an outsider’s objectivity.

Among the truly stand-out pieces are “Midrash on a Gravestone Acrostic Inscription,” a moving tribute to his mother and how her memory continues among those who knew her, and despite this, so does the sorrow of her passing; and “At Last, a Celebration, or Improvisations on the Question of Inspiration,” where Taub encourages friends and loved ones to act as he lived after he’s gone. “Activist’s Retreat” is a tightrope walk between both meanings of the word “retreat,” and “Unanswered Questions Around the Endemic Bend” brings 2020’s concerns into sharp focus again.

Taub’s closing essay is a lovely and welcoming invitation to dig deeper into the pieces already presented. The added insight makes the book that much richer. His decision to put this at the end of the book gives us a chance to draw our own conclusions about the poems and prose before getting his perspective, a valuable gift that also almost feels like a puzzle, did we get out of it what Taub intended? It’s not every day that a writer takes such an active role in reviewing their work with a reader, but Night Breaks in the Garret shows that Taub is not an everyday writer.

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