A Mayse-Bikhl

This collection of Jewish-themed poems of the fantastic by Sonya Taaffe brings together twenty poems written and published over the course of ten years. They first appeared in such venues as Goblin Fruit, Mythic Delirium, Stone Telling, Not One Of Us, Dreams & Nightmares and more, and “Domovoi, I Came Back!” was nominated for the 2011 Rhysling Award. Curated by Rose Lemberg and introduced by Jeannelle M. Ferreira, this work is a testament to an abiding tradition, sometimes flourishing and sometimes salvaged from ruin.

“Here are almost a decade’s worth of poems, curated by the author and Rose Lemberg. They tap an abiding cultural well; they are folk tales, mermaid-mayses, they are the richly hued wares of those who have traded in small, bright, enduring objects for a thousand years. Ms. Taaffe knows how to please the reading eye and linger in the senses, to charm by a sound, to sketch an inheritance with ash and fire and with sweetness. By turns intimate, elegiac, singing, and seeking, these poems are full of truth. They are deeply and completely Jewish poems, though to say that is to reach above one’s height for the emet written in the clay. Perhaps all Jewish texts look backward, inward, into dreams and the dark: better the wolf you know. These are poems for those who have known the wolf. Memory, wire-sharp and gallows-cold, is here, and the last notes of songs the whole world has forgotten. Orpheus is here too, Amazons, tzaddikim, dybbukim, small gods, and tummlers; the weighted grey of the diaspora; the warm golden stones of Jerusalem. It is all yours for the taking.”

– Jeannelle M. Ferreira

About the author:

Sonya Taaffe has a confirmed addiction to myth, folklore, and dead languages. Poems and short stories of hers have won the Rhysling Award, been shortlisted for the SLF Fountain Award and the Dwarf Stars Award, and been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, The Best of Not One of Us, and Trochu divné kusy 3. A selection of her work can be found in Postcards from the Province of Hyphens and Singing Innocence and Experience (Prime Books). She holds master’s degrees in Classics from Brandeis and Yale and once named a Kuiper belt object.