By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
What started as a yearlong project has become a four-year journey  culminating with the release of Brian Rohr’s first book, “Shaken To My Bones.”
Rohr’s book is a collection of poems, each inspired by one of the parshiyot, the weekly Torah portions. It started on Simchat Torah in 2020 as Rohr embarked on a mission to journey through the entirety of the Torah, one parsha at a time.
“I had never, as a Jewish adult or as a Jewish storyteller, read the entire Torah the whole way through and I’d always wanted to,” he said.
Amidst COVID lockdown, he joined an online Torah study group. Before their first meeting, he sat down to read the first section, Parsha Bereshit, and felt inspiration; fittingly, its first words are “In the beginning.”
“I wrote a poem and I brought it to that first class and I read it and people seemed to like it,” Rohr recalled. “So I wrote another one for Noach, which is the second week, and people liked it, too.”
A few weeks in, Rohr made the commitment to himself to see out the whole year.
“I did not have any intention of writing a book or anything like that. It was just a kind of a personal creative endeavor, one that I really appreciated because it got me back into writing,” he said. 
The commitment to complete the project created a series of natural deadlines that produced inspiration where there might not otherwise have been any. 
“I’ll be honest, there were days where I was like, ‘Oh, the class is coming up in an hour. I’ve got to write my poem,’” Rohr recalled. “Sometimes, those were my best poems.”
Each poem naturally springs from it’s associated parsha, but also incorporates the circumstances that stemmed from Rohr’s life – the isolation of COVID, the tumult of the 2020 presidential election and events that followed, and the joy of his wife’s pregnancy and the birth of their second child. Some are personal, some look through the eyes of characters Rohr creates to tell the story, and the 54 works are as stylistically diverse as the Biblical stories that inspired them.
“It’s impossible to separate my life from the poems,” Rohr explained, “because I was the one who wrote them.”
“My Longing,” the poem Rohr penned from Parsha Vayeira, contrasts the welcoming of Hashem’s messengers by Abraham to the isolation of COVID – “Blue and red birds appear in my Birch tree; Squirrels run as I open the door. They are charming, not my kin. Truth is, I rarely welcome these days,” the poem reads. 
“There’s so many things that were moving through me as I’m reading these ancient stories and ancient texts and trying to understand them and have a conversation with them,” Rohr said. “All of it dances together to create this body of work, and sometimes it’s more obvious than others.”
By Simchat Torah 2021, Rohr had competed the Torah – and had assembled a manuscript of his own. But the journey was just beginning. 
“In the editing process, you know, there were poems that I just threw out completely, when you’re writing , you know that much, not all of them land.
He set to the work of revising and polishing, soliciting feedback from friends and colleagues and eventually connecting with Marcela Sulak, the Director of  The Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University just outside Tel Aviv, Israel. 
“Her notes and feedback were invaluable to help me turn what was what I would consider a pretty rough draft into something that I felt comfortable with sending out,” Rohr said. 
Out it went to a pair of publishing houses, including Ben Yehuda Press in New Jersey. The home of the Jewish Poetry Project, Rohr was hopeful that Ben Yehuda would be interested in the work. They took their time making a decision – nine months, through which Rohr had other works rejected for publication to the point that he felt almost pre-defeated upon receiving an early morning email from the press almost a year ago. He debated reading it at work but decided to open it immediately. 
It was two sentences long and had an attachment - a draft contract.
He reread it, aloud, to his wife and children downstairs.
“I read it to them and we all just started dancing and screaming and laughing and cheering,” he said, reminiscent, perhaps, of the celebrations of the Simchat Torah holiday that marked the start of the journey. “It was such a beautiful moment.”
The journey wasn’t over then; contract negotiations and more revisions followed. The final step is the book’s official release on Sept. 3, and a celebration of that release, along with a reading from the book by Rohr, at Congregation Neveh Shalom on Sept. 17 at 6:30 pm. 
Pre-orders of the book are available from Ben Yehuda Press at benyehudapress.com/books/shaken-to-my-bones and signed copies can be purchased along with registration for the launch party at members.nevehshalom.org/event/rohr-booklaunch.