Garlic Moon
Poems and Portals
Hannah Yerington
Paperback
ISBN 9781966608721
$19.00 US
eBook available
January 26, 2027
Garlic Moon is a book of portals, prayer, and magic.
Here, we meet with the kitchen healer and the lichen rabbi. We find ourselves in a greenhouse in a snowstorm, in a sukkah filled with fairies, on a lost coast. We dip into magic realism, surrealism, and the bathtub. We are invited into a place both familiar and fantastical: the plant world of our ancestors, the home of prophet babes, barnacle geese, and everyday angels—one of embodied ritual and sacred whimsy.
Garlic Moon follows the Jewish lunisolar calendar, moving through Fall to Summer, punctuated by lists of peculiar but charming angels, and embodied writing and artistic prompts called “writual” that read as both poetry and prayer. Garlic Moon draws heavily on feminist midrash, folktale, folk magic, and plant medicine, resulting in a poetry book that is both narrative and mystical.
Hannah Yerington is programs manager at The Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia, and former director and creator of the Bolinas Poetry Camp for Girls in California. She received an MFA in Poetry from Bowling Green State University and previously published a chapbook, Sheologies. She is a friend of all flowers and lives in Vancouver with her warrior-chef husband Kris, her priestess kitten, Tala, and imp puppy, Poe. This is her full-length debut. Find her on Instagram @hannahyerington or hannahyeringtonwriting.com.
“Garlic Moon is a loving devotional to the wonders of the natural world, the timeless wisdom of the ancestors and the eternal seasons of the Jewish calendar. Closely observed, deeply spiritual, and beautifully rendered, Hannah Yerington's poetry invites us to rediscover the sacred within the quotidian by remembering the majesty of a world we share with the flora, the fauna and each other.” —Deatra Cohen, co-author of Ashkenazi Herbalism: Rediscovering the Herbal Traditions of Eastern European Jews
“To read Garlic Moon is to be transported into a sacred realm replete with directories of angels, teenage girl ancestors, and recipes for an embodied life. Deftly weaving together plant medicine and Jewish angelology, embodiment and magic, Yerington’s poems are a gift to the reader, a blessing.” —Alicia Jo Rabins, author of When We’re Born We Forget Everything
“Hannah Yerington has written a gorgeous earth-based liturgy, a treasure hunt through the sensual delights of the natural world and the ethereal wanderings of angels. These poems hold words as elegant and intricate as the traces of seafoam left on the beach when the waves go out. Many phrases here will evoke memories in the body and leave traces in the heart. Yerington lets her Jewish language blend with the landscape so that roots make Torah of the dirt, an ark may be made of white flowers, and God may be found in a flock of moths—and all that exists, from carrot soup to dahlias, has a guiding spirit. One may also find women’s magic woven through in allusions to the incantations of Sephardic healers and the hut of Baba Yaga. In Yerington’s poems, everything is alive, even honey and salt, and the reader cannot help but come alive in response.” —Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams
