In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young womans relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love and female sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies, a force somehow responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines survival, assimilation and intermarriage, subjects bound together by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speakers Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced through a teenage girls coming of age, showing the reader what it means to become - and remain - a Jewish woman in America.