Tasting Flight: Merging the Wisdom of Eve and Lilith — A Book Launch Celebration with Yiskah Rosenfeld

Join award-winning poet and scholar Yiskah Rosenfeld in celebrating her new book of poems, Tasting Flight, runner-up for the Arthur Smith Prize and a top five finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Prize.

To register for this free in-person program, click here. The Library is located at 1835 Ellis Street in San Francisco, with free garage parking at 1227 Pierce Street between Ellis and Eddy. “Tasting flights” of refreshments provided.

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 The Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks

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 midrash and kabbalah, Tasting Flight is a rich meal to be savored slowly.

— Diane Elliot, author of The Voice Is Movement: A Life in Poetry and Traces: Prayers, Poem, Torah

Tasting Flight is a Hebraic Sutra where Rosenfeld sits in meditation until she and the garden are one, bread and night are one, sacred and mundane, the cursed and the blessed, until Lilith and Eve complete the circle whose center is everywhere. Who else but Yiskah Rosenfeld to be exactly this poet?

—Chad Sweeney, author of Little Million Doors and Parable of Hide and Seek

Yiskah Rosenfeld has taught workshops combining Jewish mysticism, midrash, and creativity in the San Francisco Bay Area for more than 25 years. She taught Jewish American poetry at Temple University and served as poet-in-residence at the Brandeis Collegiate Institute and on the Arad Arts Project in the Israeli desert. Rosenfeld holds an MFA in poetry from Mills College and studied at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Poetry awards include the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Award for poems on the Jewish experience and the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize. Her writings appear in in Lilith Magazine, Tikkun Daily, Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, Bridges: A Feminist Journal, Kerem, Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, and elsewhere. She is the author of two books of poetry, Tasting Flight and Naked Beside Fish. More information can be found at yiskahrosenfeld.com.