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Barbara Goldberg

Barbara Goldberg is the author of Berta Broadfoot and Pepin the Short; 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.

Winner of the 2008 The Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry. Selected by David St. John

"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... 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

from Fortune's Darling

Barbara Goldberg

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.

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