Adam Sol is a gifted talker and a natural-born teacher. Whether speedily unpacking Moby-Dick on Radio Press’ “This Book in Five Minutes” or patiently outlining the distinctions between the Torah and the Talmud before animatedly launching into one of his favourite stories in Midrashic literature over a beer, his enthusiasm — and voice — fills a room. And as he warms up, that voice takes on an almost musical rhythm and cadence: not surprising considering his masterful use of sound in his own work.

We’ve met at Kilgour’s on Bloor to discuss his new book, Jeremiah, Ohio, a novel-in-poems that tells the story of Jeremiah, a possibly mad, self-styled, modern-day prophet who enlists the help of a jaded grad-school drop out named Bruce to drive him across the country on a holy mission of a most confused sort. Jeremiah — also a great talker, though far less coherent than Sol — has a fever-fed intensity that compels the lonely and disaffected Bruce to drop everything and help him keep accelerating toward his destiny. “Maybe it was the beer,” thinks Bruce, “but as I lolled off to my frameless bed I thought, Holy shit, I’ve got to hear more of this.”

Jeremiah, loosely based on the biblical prophet, took Sol for a long ride as well. The voice first came to him almost 10 years ago, when he was working on his second book, Crowd of Sounds, and it wouldn’t leave him alone. “At first for me it was a tonal thing,” he says. “I always start from a tonal, musical point, and I wanted to hype up the rhetoric. There’s a kind of standard in contemporary English-language poetry about the level, meditative, thoughtful, sincere, contemplative, quiet voice that suddenly comes to some profound realization. There’s nothing wrong with that — in fact some of it’s fantastic — but I found I wanted to ratchet up the rhetoric.” And what better model for high rhetoric than the Bible? He wrote one poem in Jeremiah’s voice, then half a dozen more and then ran into some problems.

“I didn’t know what to do with them,” he says, “because Jeremiah’s poems are so lyrical. He can’t narrate himself across the room.” After going back and looking at the Book of Jeremiah, Sol found that there was another character, Jeremiah’s scribe, named Baruch. And so Bruce was born; this second, more rational voice made it possible to build a narrative framework and the work started to take shape, evolving into a religio-mythic tale of an unlikely pair on a manic road trip hurtling toward possible calamity. Jeremiah is, after all, the prophet who is preaching as the temple in Jerusalem is destroyed. “He’s the doom prophet,” says Sol. “When you see him portrayed in Renaissance paintings he’s always the really depressed one.”

It’s not your everyday buddy story, but it is a moving portrait of male intimacy, which Sol asserts has great power in its inarticulateness. Early in the book, Bruce and Jeremiah bond while watching a game on TV. “It’s a masculine way of establishing friendship,” he says. “You do things together. You watch things next to each other. You stand both facing out rather than facing [in].” The work continued to grow out of the textured, believable relationship between these two emotionally insular men.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Sol shelved the project for a few years because he knew those events would be important to his character and he couldn’t write clearly about them until some time had passed. Crowd of Sounds came out in 2003, winning the Trillium Prize for poetry that year, and Sol secured a position as a prof at Laurentian University’s satellite program at Georgian College in Barrie. But Jeremiah never let him go.

“Jeremiah was kind of waiting for me. Even when I was touring Crowd of Sounds, I was working on Jeremiah again,” he says. “I was kind of happy to get back to him. He’d been scratching at my leg.” Now that the book is finished, Sol says he still feels Jeremiah in the air. “He’s a part of my brain that I could turn on and let take over. When he was kicking he would take over on his own. These days he’s quieter.”

Originally from Connecticut, Sol earned an MFA in poetry from Indiana University and a PhD in literature from the University of Cincinnati before moving to Toronto 10 years ago with his wife, Yael Splansky, a rabbi at Holy Blossom Temple, where he’s an active member of the congregation. “Someone was asking me whether or not Jeremiah was a Jewish character and I said he’s pre-Christian,” says Sol with a laugh and a good-natured wave of his hand. “He’s a Biblical guy. He’s so before that!

“Almost all the prophets in the Bible wish they didn’t have to be prophets,” he continues. “That’s a crucial uniting characteristic from Jonah all the way up to Moses. They’re all reluctant. But they’re compelled. There’s something that compels them to speak.”

Sol talks about the difference between prophets and mystics, the English Romantics’ longing for an unsustainable ecstasy, Walt Whitman’s enduring faith in America even after the Civil War, Emily Dickinson’s brilliant intensity (“you cannot say that she does not kick it”) and Cincinnati’s storied Jewish history. He recommends Robert Duvall’s 1997 movie The Apostle, in which the actor-director plays an itinerant preacher in the Deep South; he nods to the influence of gospel music on the development of his own prophet’s voice.

“I accept that Jeremiah might be a Christian character,” he says wryly, “but I maintain that only a Jew could have written him.”