The Royal Baker's Daughter: Royal Baker's Daughter

by Barbara Goldberg

University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Paper: 978-0-299-22724-1 | eISBN: 978-0-299-22723-4 | Cloth: 978-0-299-22720-3
Library of Congress Classification PS3557.O3555R69 2008
Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the 2008 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, selected by David St. John

These poems, at once elegant and earthy, reveal the inner workings of the human psyche and show us that sometimes the best defense against terror is making mischief. The Royal Baker’s Daughter was raised on a diet of stone soup and the occasional leftover royal treat. This leaves her with an appetite for authenticity. With nothing but her two deft hands to guide her, she embarks on a journey into the dark forest, “where sticks and stones and absolutes reign and nothing, even sin, is original.”

Best Fall book from the Montserrat Review

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Barbara Goldberg is the author of Berta Broadfoot and Pepin the Short: A Merovingian Romance; Cautionary Tales (winner of the Camden Poetry Award); and Marvelous Pursuits (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Award). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, and The Gettysburg Review. She is the coeditor of two anthologies of contemporary Israeli poetry, including After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War and Peace. Goldberg is senior speechwriter at AARP and teaches speechwriting, poetry, and translation at Georgetown University and at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

REVIEWS

“In Barbara Goldberg’s marvelous collection, The Royal Baker’s Daughter, cooking itself stands as a metaphor for devotion to the fruits of the earth and to the creation of human hopes. Never didactic and always scrupulous, these poems stand as a kind of testimony to the transformative alchemy of both cuisine and the natural world. Barbara Goldberg understands that, at times, only a sense of fable allows us to fully understand our own shifting, incomprehensible lives. Within and against the constellation of the family, with special resonance given to the presiding presence of the father, these poems show us how we sometimes choose to devour—over and over again, often relishing their texture—those very wounds that have made us who we are and what we have come to believe.”—David St. John, Felix Pollak Prize judge

“The Royal Baker’s Daughter is a remarkable book of poems. It explores, in familial, historical, and global contexts, the idea of boundaries and conflict, connection and redemption. These poems in a way remind us that all human relationships are negotiations—and that the integrity with which we navigate through them is often the only thing anchoring us to a comprehensible place.” —Laura Orem, The Montserrat Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments		000
<LINE SPACE>
Amulet		000
<LINE SPACE>
I. Kindness
Aluminum	000
Milk	000
Carvel	000
My Father's Mistress	000
	1. She of No Name	000
	2. Herta			000
	3. Lily			000
Star	000
Kindness	000
Keeping Watch	000
Pretty Stories, Funny Pictures		000
Our Lady	000
Nude Study	000
Wiedergutmachung	000
Keeping Up	000
Dust	000
Homework	000
II. Cedar tree. Starfish. Beautiful eyes.
The Day Before	000
Flight	000
From the Book of Judges	000
Fault	000
Codes	000
Burnt Offering		000
Sarah Reflects		000
Milcah			000
My Mother's Hair		000
Destroyer in Paradise	000
Point of Origin	000
Dybbuk		000
Naming a City		000
The Blonde Goddess of Saravan	000
Critter		000
Produits de Terroir	000
Conservator	000
Headquarters	000
III. Fortune's Darling
The Kingdom of Speculation	000
Small Wonder		000
Fortune's Darling		000
	Spitting Image		000
	Her Four Crinolines	000
	Souvenir			000
	What She Eats		000
	Cameo of Fortune	000
	Winning the Pot		000
	Those Nights		000
	Wee One		000
	The Way She Likes It	000
Slough of the Seven Toads		000
Elementals	000
Fairy Tale	000
The Early Childhood of Grief		000
After Babel	000
Flock	000
Riddle		000
Cinema Verité		000
No Small Feat		000
Weight		000
Far Flung	000
Once, the Buffalo		000
The Fullness Thereof		000
<LINE SPACE>
Gourmand's Prayer	000
<LINE SPACE>
Biographical Note	000

EXCERPT
“Fated to be fickle in food as in love. Not one flavor that she craves but a lick of this, of that. Sauerkraut and caraway, pickled beets, mutton, and leeks. This does not even touch upon the subject of sweets, for her nonnegotiable, as for others, faith. She takes her lumps of sugar straight. Or with crushed poppy seed to make a paste. Dusted over dumplings, powdered over cake. Never having swilled mother’s milk, nutmeg in her coffee, black.” —excerpt from “Fortune’s Darling” copyright The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

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