Bot, make me com is a singular poetry collection in which the boundaries of the body and the land have been breached. Poetry seeks a body and recognition of its own; the bot, the new oracle, answers—but does not recognize. In “Me Too” and “Sex Tunnels,” sexual violence is inscribed upon the female body; in “Last Call” and the “Re’im Map,” the massacre of October 7 is written as the breaching of the land’s border and the invasion of homes and kibbutzim. Out of the wound shared by the female body and the land, poetry’s demand for a body and for recognition becomes an urgent call to reclaim sovereignty over the boundary that has been breached. From this emerges the book’s biblical layer—a new mythology of woman-as-land, in which poetry reclaims not only its voice, but also its power to act.

Like Deborah the prophetess, poetry gives catastrophe a voice and a public form. The poem “Awake?” asks whether we are awake even as we act; and in “Krav—Barak” (“Lightning Battle”), a title suggesting a swift, almost instantaneous battle, the Hebrew word krav (“battle”) is read in reverse to reveal barak (“lightning,” while also echoing the biblical commander Barak). The bot’s speech itself is read backwards—as though the answer, and perhaps even the possibility of awakening the world from its numbness, were hidden within language itself.

Like the biblical Yael, poetry turns the tools of the home—and of language—into instruments of decisive action. Writing about “Last Call,” the book’s editor, Dr. Efrat Mishori, observed: “The playful, repetitive virtuosity entices the reader to come closer, and once the reader is at point-blank range, it fires the message.” This is a Yael-like maneuver: just as Yael draws Sisera into her tent and kills him with a tent peg, the poem draws the reader inward through childlike language—and then turns language itself into the peg.

The book does not merely interpret catastrophe in a prophetic voice—it bears the wound in its own body, through words that are cut, reversed, and ruptured across the page. From there, the violation extends into the act of reading itself, which becomes yet another site of intrusion, where the mechanisms of language act upon us without our noticing.

In “On Three Men the World Stands,” the line “כָּל הַבָּנוֹת NOTNOT” (“all the girls NOTNOT”) contains within it both the Hebrew word notnot—“give,” in the feminine plural, with a sexual implication in context—and the doubled English not. Negation flips into affirmation: the woman’s “no” becomes the “yes” that culture has learned to hear. The same mechanism operates in the book’s English title, Bot, make me com: the title stops just before the final e, transferring the act of completion to the reader.

Will you read what the woman is saying—or what you have been trained to complete?