Poetry reading presented by Bay Area Book Festival

12:00pm | Conference Room

Jewish Arts and Bookfest
Sunday, May 4, 2025

at UC Berkeley’s Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, 2121 Allston Way, Berkeley,  CA

Join poets Steven Rood and Marcia Falk as they read from their most recent collections of poetry. 

Rood will read from his book, Music from Behind a Stone Wall , a collection of poems that take on a musical sensibility as they flow from the poet’s sixty years as a classical guitarist.

Falk will read from her new book, The Sky Will Overtake You, which reviewer Michael R. Mantell has described as “a quietly powerful collection of short poems that speaks to the heart of the reader.” Mantell continues, “Rooted in personal loss and shaped by Jewish wisdom, these poems don’t just speak about grief—they sit with it, offering a deep, intellectually and emotionally contemplative space where emotion and meaning unfold naturally.”

About Steven Rood

Steven Rood is a poet and practicing trial lawyer. His new collection is Music from Behind a Stone Wall. Jeffrey Kingman (author of Beyond That Hill I Gather) says, “Steven Rood’s Music From Behind a Stone Wall is a deep, expansive dive into a very personal journey. It has a slow burn that accumulates power. The poems are striking for their directness, clarity, and piercing honesty.” Rood’s previous book, Naming the Wind, was published by Omnidawn in June 2022. An earlier iteration of that manuscript was a 2019 National Poetry Series Finalist. Rood’s poems appear in Quarterly West, Marin Poetry Center Anthology, Fugue, Lyric, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tar River Poetry, New Letters, The Marlboro Review, The Atlanta Review, The Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere.

Music from Behind a Stone Wall

A collection expressing musical experience and daily life through poetry.

The poems in Steven Rood’s newest collection take on a musical sensibility as they flow from the poet’s sixty years as a classical guitarist who remains preoccupied with the tonalities of daily life. Each poem in music from behind a stone wall comes together to build a multi-layered symphony that reveals the delights and travails of family life and moments of intimate connection with animals and plants. At the core of the book are poems considering the overwhelming task of trying to communicate the essence of musical experience via the written word. This is a book of grief and joy sung with lyric acuity, vivid images, and formal variation.

About Marcia Falk

Marcia Falk is widely known in the progressive Jewish world for her re-creations of Hebrew and English prayers from an inclusive, nonpatriarchal perspective. Her new book of poems is The Sky Will Overtake You. Her other books include The Book of Blessings: New Jewish Prayers for Daily Life, the Sabbath, and the New Moon Festival (CCAR Press); The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season (Brandeis U. Press); Inner East: Illuminated Poems and Blessings (Oak & Acorn Press); and Night of Beginnings: A Passover Haggadah (JPS / U. of Nebraska Press). She is the author of a now-classic translation of the Song of Songs (Brandeis U. Press); translations of modern Hebrew and Yiddish women poets Zelda and Malka Heifetz Tussman; and three chapbooks of her own poetry. She has a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford and was a postdoctoral Fellow at the Hebrew U. of Jerusalem. She holds an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She was a university professor for two decades and today lectures widely.

A lifelong painter, Marcia studied at the Art Students League of New York, where she is a Life Member. Her pastel drawing appears on the cover of The Sky Will Overtake You.

Marcia grew up in New York and now lives in Berkeley. She is married to the poet Steve Rood. Their son, Abraham Gilead Falk-Rood (Abby), teaches English and music to new immigrants in an Oakland public high school.

The Sky Will Overtake You

The poems in The Sky Will Overtake You abound in a rare, infectious, and hard-won ecstasy, the consequence-at least in part-of exquisite attention to whatever they approach. They celebrate “the days laid out like jewels / on a merchant’s table” even as they acknowledge grief and loss and the knowledge that “[There is] no keeping anything.” These poems make ephemerality palpable, establishing it as an essential feature of what we treasure. “What Do You Have?” asks a poem’s title. Its final lines respond, “Only this bit of time, / like clouds unforming- / even as you point to it, // gone.”

-JACQUELINE OSHEROW, author of Divine Ratios