Overview

"Rooted in the origin myths of Genesis when the Divine ""stepped out of itself onto the slick, dark lid of otherness,"" Tasting Flight unflinchingly questions, complicates, and celebrates what it means to be a woman and to be deeply, imperfectly, human. -Joy Ladin, National Jewish Book Award-winning author of The Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks"

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9781956440836

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"A yearning dominates the vibrant poems in Tasting Flight, specifically the desire to be enough. Of course, though, one is always enough. The observant, insightful, and confident speaker in these poems knows this truth intellectually but searches to internalize such knowledge. All of the poems are deeply rooted in the lyrical tradition, following the switchbacks and curves of a mind always in motion, perhaps contemplating the beauty of moths at night or the intricacies of raising a child. Whatever the subject, Tasting Flight is a book that sings back to the exploding stars.-Charlotte Pence, author of Code and judge for the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize The poems in this collection are confidently crafted, spiritually and emotionally insightful and precise, and intelligent all at once. Yiskah Rosenfeld does not shy away from the hardest subject matter and makes language equal to it. ""On Becoming a Woman,"" a moving and surprising mother/daughter poem, is the best I've read on this subject. Rooted in the origin myths of Genesis when the Divine ""stepped out of itself onto the slick, dark lid of otherness,"" Tasting Flight unflinchingly questions, complicates, and celebrates what it means to be a woman and to be deeply, imperfectly, human.-Joy Ladin, National Jewish Book Award winner and author of Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks This collection begins with its hands in the dirt, in the muck of anger and refusal, the underground where seeds disintegrate so something new, something nourishing can grow. Yiskah Rosenfeld's poems are meticulous, vivid, and poignant. They scrape the heart with surgical precision, bridging generations, awash in light, enwombed in darkness. Prepared with love, seasoned with grief, midrash, and kabbalah, Tasting Flight is a rich meal that begs for slow chewing and gradual digestion.-Diane Elliot, author of The Voice Is Yiskah Rosenfeld's Tasting Flight is both a sampling of subtle variations of spirit and a winging off the ground in self-reclamation. These are strongly crafted poems, wide ranging in form and genre, steeped in the vocabulary of Jewish customs and texts in cross-cultural conversation, as when the speaker tugs and worries the fringes of a prayer shawl ""like rosaries, frayed jeans."" We discover the making of a self through the landscapes of cities, alphabets, stars, planets, languages, hours on the clock, and relationships, with explorations along the edges. Among myriad mysteries is the certainty that ""I don't deserve"" because ""I am not pretty"" and identifications with the desires of Eve and the skin of Miriam until in a culminating poem, the speaker, prostrate in gratitude, finds herself ""bowing to myself, big-bellied as Buddha and just as deserving."" In poems dense with thought and rich in feeling, a life in its details finds vital significance in the context of long timelines and a vast, expanding universe.-Lori Hope Lefkovitz, founding executive director of ritualwell.org and author of In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identity"

Author Information

Yiskah Rosenfeld holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and an MA in jurisprudence and social policy from UC Berkeley. She is also a proud rabbinical school dropout. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her awards include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award and the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize. Tasting Flight was the 2022 Arthur Smith Prize runner-up and a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Rosenfeld is the author of Naked Beside Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2024). Poems appear in The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Lilith Magazine, RATTLE, December Magazine, Cottonwood, and elsewhere. Her writings have appeared in anthologies such as Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, Why to these Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers, and Yentl's Revenge: the Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Rosenfeld taught literature at Temple University and was the poet-in-residence on the Arad Arts Project in Israel and the Brandeis Collegiate Institute in California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where she balances solo parenting with teaching workshops on spirituality, feminism, and creative writing.

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