Nothing Is For Everyone

Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is a manifesto of the unmanifest. Deeply, devotedly hybrid in influence and expression, this wild collection draws on rabbinic linguistics and kabbalistic meditation, free jazz and hip-hop, Marcel Duchamp and the Magid of Mezritch—all to reveal the permutational quality of language itself: its instability, resistance to containment, and divine fault lines. In these times when answers are plentiful and questions impoverished, Pearlstein’s insistence on the materiality of nothingness reveals that in fact nothing really matters.

88 pages, soft cover; book dimensions: 5.5″ x 7.5″

Bio

Eden Pearlstein is a poet, performer, chronic collaborator, and cofounder of Ayin Press. Over the past two decades he has created an eclectic portfolio of audio, visual, textual, and curatorial works and projects. Eden is the co-author/co-editor of the chapbooks In/Flux: On Influence, Inspiration, Transmission, and Transformation; Taste and See: A Psychedelic Pesach Companion; Indwelling: An Earth-Based Sukkot Companion; and the artbook Speechless (with Cannupa Hanska Luger). Eden lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two children.

Praise for Nothing Is for Everyone

“Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is a revelation. A master wordsmith of our generation, Pearlstein playfully provokes his readers to consider the beauty, the terror, and the absurdity of existence through his signature poetic mix of spoken word, deep hasidic storytelling, overflowing hilarity, and a refusal to let any particular sentence reach its naturally expected outcome. Buy this book today.”
—Joey Weisenberg, author of The Torah of Music

“In these rhythmic and mystery-laden poems that evoke both personal depth and vibrant soundings of the sacred, Eden Pearlstein draws forth the contours of a contemporary mythology that is at once earthy and existential, metaphysical and mundane. In Nothing Is for Everyone, Pearlstein emerges as a poet who weaves together mystical transcendence; the deep well of motifs and symbols of the Jewish tradition; and a surprisingly fresh music of the fragile and all-too-human soul.”
—Eitan P. Fishbane, Professor of Jewish Mysticism at The Jewish Theological Seminary, author of The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar

“With playful grace, Eden Pearlstein tugs at the essence of what makes life meaningful and what kindles spirit. From parenthood to the perspective of the soul to the paradox of being at home in exile, Pearlstein’s poetry asks and answers the most foundational and far-out questions at the heart of the human experience.”
—Madison Margolin, author of Exile and Ecstasy: Growing Up With Ram Dass and Coming of Age in the Jewish Psychedelic Underground

“Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is soaked in the imagery of kabbalah and nondual consciousness—mystical and timeless, yet somehow relevant to walking down the street. The poems draw us in but never quite resolve into simple narrative (much like the world around us). There is something pointillist about these poems, something atomic that breaks down consciousness into its component parts, ‘every piece a puzzle unto itself.’ These careful and potent observations from a modern kabbalist’s notebook offer a slant on Jewish theology that embraces the particular while dissolving into the cosmic; brilliantly directing us toward the nothing that is so deeply, specifically and gloriously—us.”
—Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams