Jacob’s subjects do not suffer from a lack of faith but from the weight of conviction. In ‘Healing Sonata’, we witness the subject’s impatient lamentation over God’s seeming inactivity: ‘Whereas, God was busy, leagues above/ tilting sunlight into my [his] bone marrow.’ Yet, in ‘The Sutra on Creed’, the answer emerges: ‘Perhaps, God’s quiet works / as such. So still, it wrecks our bones. / You should build a life out of astonishment.’ A sutra prayer reflects this sentiment: ‘Lord, increase my bewilderment.’ There is a bliss in waiting, in waning, until the arrival of light from beyond. What Jacob’s poems offer, then, is the linguistic currency of light and salvation—or what many might consider a ludicrous sense of hope, an ignis fatuus reflected in the audacious lines of ‘Contraindication’: ‘Because the ache is wider than my life./ Lord, your grace is wider than my life.’ 

Often, the elitist tendencies of Jacob’s subjects prevent them from embracing this truth. They ‘are surrendered to’ rather than ‘surrendering’ to despair, which accounts for the melancholic verses in some of his poems. In ‘Dark Fruit’, Jacob writes, ‘All the ways we plummet/ into fire, all the precious, unnamable/ ways we dip our fingers into dirt/ in hopes of planting, but come/ up punctured, aching, animal.’ In ‘It is Impossible to Live’, he writes that, ‘Perhaps grace is a tangible thing/ only to the one who watches another bleed.’ In ‘The Craft of Loneliness’, ‘how perpendicular I am to/ pestilence/ munching always the hem/ of despair/ with shaky teeth.’ These verses return us repeatedly to the realization that the central conflict in the lives of Jacob’s subjects is not the lack of faith but its fragile, uncertain orchestration. In ‘Disillusionment Sutra’, he writes, ‘The smallest unit of hope is fantasy.’ Jacob does not shy away from the ugly truth that hope is tedious, painful, and disillusioning, yet it agonizes in endurance, in pursuit of peace. Hope, here, is another invention of God and what has kept Jacob tethered: set his feet upon the rock despite the rage of the tumultuous wind of his life.