Book

From the back cover:

 

"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 islolate 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

 

Review of Bastard Heart in Quarterly West
Review of Bastard Heart in American Microreviews & Interviews

Interview about Bastard Heart on KTEP "Words on a Wire"

Interview about Bastard Heart in 15 Bytes

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Work Online

Recent in Print

"Metallurgy" and "Short Hike in the Chon-Kemin Valley," North American Review, fall 2020

"My Brother & I Delay Our Sleep," The Southern Review, fall 2020

"Further Regarding the Sluice Gates of Bishkek," Southern Indiana Review, winter 2018

"Virtue, 1969" and "My Brother & I Invent 1973," The Normal School, fall 2018

"Night and a Morning and a Day," Crab Orchard Review, fall 2018