Tasting Flight: poems, with Yiskah Rosenfeld

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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 The Book of Anna and Shekhinah Speaks

These poems are imbued with sensuousness and awe, like the flesh of fruit torn and tasted, or myth born entirely of body, where the sustaining miracle becomes your daily life, “wounding you to a new self.” 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

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 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

Yiskah Rosenfeld is the author of Tasting Flight (Madville Publishing, 2024) and Naked Beside Fish (Finishing Line Press, 2024), an ekphrastic chapbook. She 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, she was awarded the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, the Reuben Rose Memorial Prize, and was runner-up for the Jeff Marks Prize, the Julia Darling Prize, and, most recently, the Frontier Poetry Roots & Roads Prize. Tasting Flight was the runner-up for the Arthur Smith Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize. Poems appear in Lilith Magazine, The Seattle Review, The Bitter Oleander, Rattle, Slippery Elm, December, and elsewhere. Her writings have also appeared in anthologies such as Why to These Rocks: the 50th Anniversary Anthology of the Community of Writers, Wild Gods: An Anthology of Ecstatic Poetry, and Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism. Kansas born and raised, Rosenfeld currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she balances solo parenting with teaching workshops on feminism, spirituality, and creativity.