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

by Barbara Goldberg

Overview

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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780299227241
Publisher:	University of Wisconsin Press
Publication date:	02/19/2008
Series:	Wisconsin Poetry Series
Edition description:	1
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an 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.

Editorial 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

From the Publisher