Review: Yoke & Feather

Finding the Divine Within the Mundane
Review: Yoke & Feather

​Jordan G. Avery

Jessie Van Eerden
Essay Collection
Dzanc Books, pp. 212
Cost: $17.95
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Author Jessie Van Eerden is not content to offer simple or comforting conclusions about faith; instead, she presents prayer as a practice that can be both comforting and uncomfortable, both a yoke and a feather. Her latest book, aptly titled Yoke & Feather, is an intimate collection of braided and lyrical essays that weaves together themes of spirituality, identity, and the search for meaning in the mundane.

​The title itself captures the duality: a yoke is a burden, a weight of responsibility that faith pushes onto people, while a feather represents moments of grace and lightness. This duality of prayer—its ability to both weigh down and lift up—is a present theme throughout the essays, as Van Eerden reflects on the ways in which her prayers have shaped her understanding of herself and the world around her. It is also a central theme, an essential practice that grounds Van Eerden’s reflections on her past and her present, her family, and her relationship with God. She writes how prayer extends beyond the traditional and formal act, it’s more than a conversation with God. “Singing does not stop you from dying. Prayer does not stop you from hurting, but maybe it breaks you open so you are large enough to bear God inside…” (17).  This is part of the yolk of prayer, the heaviness that can sometimes come with it.

In her essay "Meet Me At The Dollar Store General Across From The Family Dollar,” this theme of everyday comforting prayers is especially prevalent. She says, “…the kind of prayer I’m talking about: ineffectual beautiful songlike blessing that can fix nothing, slight and obtrusive enough to slip through the cracks of your terror and grief…” (20). This type of prayer is the feather, so small and light you may not even notice it. Jessie's prayers take on many forms throughout the essays: some are spoken out loud in moments of desperation, while others, like the example above, go unvoiced and instead exist within a person. The use of prayer as both an outward and inward practice gives these essays a contemplative quality that mimics prayer itself. 

Van Eerden’s prose is another of the novel’s standout features. Her writing is lush and poetic, imbued with a sense of reverence for both the natural world and the inner lives of her character who has a genuine longing for divine connection. In the essay “When The Spirit Intercedes With Sighs Unutterable,” Van Eerden writes about finding God in the physical realm and throughout “our stirred frenzy” that happens to be life (42). This essay is about finding the divine in the little moments, how searching for God or the divine is not by sight, but through one's own body: “Perhaps God, like a face, is most beautiful by feel” (42). Her approach to prayer in these moments is poetic; she finds beauty in the mundane and the  act of contemplation itself, even when answers remain elusive and holding space for the unknown even when the unknown is not satisfying. Her writing suggests that the value of prayer lies not in the resolution of doubt or the receipt of answers, but in the ongoing process of searching and reflecting. 

Ultimately, Yoke & Feather is an observation of the human condition. Through Jessie Van Eerden’s honest and vulnerable reflections, readers are invited to consider the ways in which prayer shapes their own lives—not just in moments of religious devotion, but in the everyday acts of memory, and reflection. Readers would do well to linger in the collection’s quiet moments, to appreciate the subtleties and complexities of Van Eerden’s language. The essays offer no easy answers, but they provide a sense of solace in the ongoing practice of seeking, a reminder that prayer, like life, is a process of balancing burdens and blessings, the weight of the yoke and the lightness of the feather.