There are poetry collections that entertain, some that impress, and a rare few that quietly change the emotional temperature of the room. Rebecca Herz’s newest release, Locus of Control, belongs firmly in that last category. Arriving in January 2026, this striking new book does something few modern poetry collections attempt: it opens the door between therapy and art and invites the reader to sit down in both spaces at once. The result is a body of work that feels intimate yet expansive, clinical yet musical, deeply personal yet unmistakably universal.
Herz writes from a life lived at intersections. She is a school-based crisis counselor, a neurodivergent thinker, a queer Jewish writer, and a new mother navigating the relentless motion of contemporary life. Rather than compartmentalizing these identities, she layers them, allowing each to inform the next. In Locus of Control, professional vocabulary becomes poetic texture. Emotional labor becomes lyric exploration. The internal monologue of the caregiver becomes a shared conversation with the reader.
The collection’s central tension revolves around care: who gives it, who receives it, and what it costs to hold space for others while searching for steadiness yourself. Herz captures the exhaustion of supporting struggling students, the quiet unraveling that can happen after the office door closes, and the uneasy truth that therapists are not immune to the storms they help others weather. These poems do not romanticize the work; they honor it, question it, and humanize it.
Mental health themes run through the collection without slipping into abstraction. Herz traces neurodivergence and burnout with specificity and compassion, translating diagnostic language into something soft-edged and emotionally legible. Clinical terms become poem titles, reframed not as cold categories but as windows into lived experience. Concepts like countertransference and co-regulation become opportunities to explore how deeply human connection reshapes both patient and practitioner. Even imposter syndrome appears not as a buzzword, but as a pulse beneath the speaker’s day-to-day reality.
One of the collection’s most powerful threads is the collision of personal life with global unease. Herz writes about fertility treatments unfolding alongside breaking news alerts, about building a family while absorbing the anxieties of students, about ancient religious inheritance braided with modern identity. Jewish tradition and queer selfhood coexist on the page, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in tension, always with honesty. This layering gives the collection a feeling of depth that rewards slow reading and repeated visits.
A standout moment arrives in a poem centered on radical acceptance, a phrase familiar to therapists but here transformed into something quietly revolutionary. Rather than a platitude, it becomes a hard-won declaration: an invitation to make peace with uncertainty, to remain open in a world that often feels unstable. The poem reads like both a professional mantra and a personal vow, the kind of piece that lingers long after the book is closed.
The emotional range of Locus of Control is matched by its craft. Herz’s voice is conversational but precise, tender but unsentimental. She understands the power of the unsaid, letting silence work between lines. Ordinary scenes—a school hallway, a kitchen table, a late-night phone screen—become sites of revelation. Her poems move with the rhythm of thought itself: looping, pausing, returning with new insight.
Readers familiar with Herz’s earlier work will recognize thematic continuities. Her debut collection explored Jewish identity through queer and feminist lenses, threading ancestral memory through contemporary experience. In this new book, that same curiosity about belonging reappears, now joined by the urgency of professional responsibility and the awe of new parenthood. It feels like a natural evolution: a writer growing outward while digging deeper inward.
There is also a sense of community impact embedded in the project. Proceeds from the collection support an organization dedicated to LGBTQ+ Jewish youth from Orthodox and traditional communities, aligning the book’s themes of care with tangible action. That gesture reinforces what the poems already suggest: empathy is not only emotional; it is structural, practical, and ongoing.
In a cultural moment where mental health conversations are everywhere yet often flattened into slogans, Locus of Control offers something richer. It respects complexity. It allows contradiction. It acknowledges that healing is not linear and that caretakers need care too. These poems are not prescriptions; they are companionship.
For New Jersey readers, there is something especially resonant in watching innovative literary voices gain momentum in the broader creative landscape. The state has long nurtured storytellers who push boundaries, from musicians to filmmakers to writers unafraid of emotional candor. Those interested in the broader world of visual and narrative creativity flourishing locally can explore more of that energy through Explore New Jersey’s film and television features, where storytelling in all forms continues to thrive.
Locus of Control ultimately feels less like a book you read and more like a room you enter. A room where clinical notes become stanzas, where therapy sessions echo into lullabies, where identity is both examined and celebrated. Rebecca Herz has created a collection that meets the reader where they are and gently walks beside them, reminding us that in the spaces where care and poetry overlap, something quietly transformative can occur.
