Eve the Inventor by Karen Greenbaum-Maya is a hybrid collection of poems, prose, and short fiction inspired by the Jewish story that God will not destroy the world as long as there are 36 good people, good souls in it. The characters in this collection aren’t secular saints, they are decent people, deeply decent, struggling against painful burdens. Eve the Inventor explores the painfulness that exists simply because of the way the world is.
When Eve bites into the apple, she invents Time. In the small space of 18 poems, Greenbaum-Maya transverses that time using a cast of heroes: her grandfather the undercover Nazi hunter, Buster Keaton, her dance teacher Irene Serata, Van Gogh, her classmate the math genius, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Rembrandt, Einstein (and a mathematical explanation of why he stopped wearing socks). The souls in these pages all embellished this earth with art, music, science, or dance. The author’s insights into culture and cultural history are rich and surprising, and often humorous. But she is not naïve. Even in the shadow of war and antisemitism, she manages to build a world where we can believe, once more, that it might all be worth saving. She reminds us that this world, however imperfect, is what we have, that it is rich and worthy—that we each have it in us to make it rich and worthy—and that at least while we are alive, there is no way to leave.
—Donna Spruijt-Metz, author of Dear Ghost, (winner, Harbor Review’s Editor Prize)
Here is the short with a reading by Greenbaum-Maya from the book featuring a score by E. Lonnie Methe and Dennis Callaci. The book is out now and available here.