Mrs. Dumpty (Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry)

The poems in Mrs. Dumpty are about “a great fall,” the dissolution of a long and loving marriage, but they are not simply documentary or elegiac. What interests Chana Bloch is the inner life: how we are formed by our losses and our parents’ losses, how we learn what we need to know through our intuitions and confusions, how we deny and delay and finally discover who we are.