Bastard Heart (Gerald Cable Book Award)

Raphael Dagold's gorgeous collection of poems explores the ways that family and community narratives of pain, hope, loss, self-protection and self-preservation echo powerfully through generations. In Dagold's poems, intense lyricism is fueled by poetic restraint, just as images of wreckage co-exist with beauty, and our awareness of the Jews' traumatic past lives in and alongside of the Jewish diaspora's understanding of the present. But of course, in Bastard Heart, such moments of perception and their attendant definitions of identity would be impossible to isolate or maintain over time, as Dagold shows us that our very bodies are constantly in emotional and physical flux, awake to the realities of both pleasure and pain, the heart--as he informs us in his collection's astonishing title poem--"an unschooled flock, an open house."   Paisley Rekdal (blurb)