Gleaning Ruth

"Jennifer Koosed's Gleaning Ruth is a primer in creative exegetical gleaning, crossing with intellectual and aesthetic dexterity geographical, temporal, and disciplinary borders. From the fields of ancient Moab and Bethlehem to the fields of northeastern Ohio and France, from the biblical narrative landscape to contemporary film, fiction, stage, and memoir, Koosed gathers ideas and images to remind us how food production and procurement factor into our constructions of home, kinship, gender relationships, cross-cultural connections, and indeed survival itself. Truly a 'green' reading of the book of Ruth: gritty, grainy, and urgent"—Danna Nolan Fewell, Drew University

"It is startling how much one learns in reading this book—about the anthropology of kinship, food and foodways, ancient agricultural practices, the physiology of lactation, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and even, in the autobiographical sections, about the growing season in northeastern Ohio. Most of all one learns about the book of Ruth; because, as Koosed shows, all of these topics are relevant to interpreting the biblical story. The result is a fabulously rich reading that reclaims Ruth from the platitudes of romance and easy moral lessons. The beauty of the biblical book remains, but clearly this is a tough-minded beauty."—Tod Linafelt, Georgetown University