Landed: A Yogi's Memoir in Pieces & Poses
By Jennifer Lang
Vine Leaves Press, Oct 2024
Amazon, $17.99 Paperback, 308 pages
Reviewed by Shlomo Liberman
Landed – a unique combination of memoir and yoga
American-born Jennifer Lang traces her journey-both on and off the yoga mat-reckoning with her adopted country Israel, midlife hormones, cross-cultural marriage and their imminent empty nest.
Landed is a deeply personal exploration of identity, culture, and the search for belonging. Lang, torn between the United States and Israel, grapples with feeling like an outsider in both places and constantly navigating the expectations of each. She eventually realizes the words her yoga teachers had been teaching for the past decades: root down into the ground and stay true to yourself. Finally, she understands that home is about who you are, not where you live.
Written in experimental style, Landed spans over seven years, each year punctuated with chakra wisdom from nationally-acclaimed Rodney Yee, her first teacher. This is Lang's second experimental prose memoir, the first being Places We Left Behind published in September 2023. Lang was one of my first Creative Writing teachers, running a small workshop in her then home in Raanana which led me to continue to an MA degree in Creative Writing at the Shandy Rudoff program at Bar-Ilan University.
I have very little prior knowledge of yoga and had some difficulty following the meaning of the Sanskrit names of the yoga poses. But Lang uses the yoga poses as interlude to her real-life situations (pieces) in a fascinating manner.
Landed is very personal and Lang both quotes and argues extensively with both her French-born husband and two daughters. As her family did not agree to be identified by name, she invents a persona for each: husband becomes Mari and the daughters simply Daughter1 and 2. She also has a sibling, a brother with a complicated relationship - a major factor is him being more observant - so she calls him siB but superposes the siB with a black box throughout. These and other experimental techniques which she uses throughout the book make the book an easy-to-read but compelling experience.
If you want to find out more, buy the book! Highly recommended.