There is usually a thing under the thing.

The poetry of SKRAM draws from a deep well: anthropology, field archaeology, ancient Near Eastern and Classical literature, and the Jewish and Christian traditions. A few lines might carry an ancient argument, a biblical image, or a strange piece of rabbinic lore. This blog is where we dig into the literary theories on the field of play.

Here you’ll find essays on the worlds behind the words: how humans tell stories, how stories become sacred, and how those sacred stories shape the people who inherit them. We’ll follow poems, myths, and law codes through the cultures that made them—and ask what happens when we read them with their ancient strangeness intact.

Running through it all is an obsession with being human: how we name the divine, live with doubt, confront mortality, and find something worth loving in a world that regularly loses its mind.

Bring your questions. There is a lot beneath the surface, and perhaps we can arrive at better and better questions.