Sundress Reads: Review of The Eating Knife

The Eating Knife by Ayelet Amittay (Fernwood Press, 2025) reimagines different biblical tales through a deeply personal and contemporary lens. Also in this collection, Amittay explores various forms & structures of poetry. The speaker’s voice comes through in each poem, one raw with youth, vulnerability, and the weight of ancestry. Amittay acknowledges the impact of family and how language is rooted deep into their storytelling and experiences, taking us readers through different emotions and moments of reflection. By exposing raw truths about trauma, masculinity, and generational heritage, this collection offers an exploration of violence, both literal and inherited, across the boundaries of the body, family, and faith.

Each poem leaves the reader with an a part of the speaker—a knife, God’s presence, the feeling of judgment or even a certain gut feeling. Amittay explores the raw truth of her trauma, for example, the title poem starts off with a striking line that immediately places a vivid image in my head: “Bloodless meat on the cutting board” (Amittay 16). Amittay continues into a much deeper story. Through poetry, Amittay uses blood, meat and the act of cutting to discuss the themes of masculinity and generational heritage. Amittay uses her male relatives and the connections they share to show the imbalance of gender roles in her culture. With only a few lines, each poem has a message that explores different themes through language, whether it be a language besides English in this case there is Hebrew incorporated as well, but also the choice of words. 

Although each poem is strong on its own, many images and references reoccur throughout the collection, such as religious references, family members and gender roles that are important to the speaker, making The Eating Knife feel cohesive. For one, incorporating bits of Hebrew adds a touch that makes the collection stand out from others I’ve read, helping Amittay build a sense of self for the speaker. On an emotional level, we are confronted with the speaker’s trauma and experiences in this collection in the poem “O.” A prose poem, “O” starts off with another strong opening: “the circle in which we sit before my mother opens her / mouth to speak” (Amittay 34). This detail about the mother’s mouth makes us readers feel as if we are being consumed into this poem, compelled to hear this difficult story. This feeling is carried throughout the collection. Readers are faced with the difficulties of English not being the mother tongue and how that relates to the mother and the family. We must sit with discomfort as we witness these stories. Amittay also makes use of the page with the form she chose for each poem; by slowing down or quickening the pace as needed, she guided me with care.

Later in the collection, “Name” describes an experience many folks face in the United States—changing their birth name to be more “American” so it is easier for certain people to pronounce. Too often folks have to give up a piece of their identity, an important part such as your name, by shortening their name or finding an American version to go by. We see the confusion that the daughter in this poem is facing when she witnesses adults call her father “Ron” although she has always considered him “Abba” and nothing else. Amittay expresses her confusion with the line “Did he / want to exist in Hebrew or English?” (Amittay 39). Instead of trying to question her father, to her, he remains Abba. Younger Amittay couldn’t understand why her father was being called something other than his name. As a first generation American, I also witnessed my father Americanize his name to make it easier for the American tongue to pronounce many times.

Poetry is a vessel for a writer to encapsulate two worlds that they find themselves in—reality and their inner self, the experiences that they face and traumas they carry. Through The Eating Knife, we see the speaker hold onto faith and what it means to them. Religion and the words of God play a huge role in their upbringing, and it stays in their adult life. Towards the end of the collection in “Who Revives the Dead,” we readers experience a burnt down city that once held so many memories for the speaker and the people of the town. The speaker and their family have to leave their country with the idea that there might be a chance of no return. Here, too, the speaker makes a call out to heaven and God, questioning if this is what is intended,

As they leave their homeland, they witness everything once a place to live has become a place of ashes and nothing else.

The Eating Knife ends with “The Mirror in His Pocket” in which the speaker has an interaction with God. As God pulls out a mirror for the speaker to look at themself, they are unable to. The mirror symbolizes what the speaker is feeling as they end this collection after writing all of these stories and the memories they are referring to during this time. The mirror acts as a moment of reflection. This mysteriousness leaves the reader wanting more of this dialogue with God. But it ends abruptly when God shuts the mirror and the poem ends. With the collection ending this way, it made me want to know more about the speaker and what they continued to do after these moments.

The Eating Knife is available at Fernwood Press

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Angela Cene is a poet, raised Massachusetts by two Albanian Immigrants. She enjoys writing about the body, & how it relates to the world & our experiences. After earning her bachelors in Writing, Literature & Publishing from Emerson College she is currently preparing to apply to Law Schools. Angela enjoys to travel & find new restaurants.