Raphael Dagold's poems, short stories, and photographs have appeared in Frank, Northwest Review, Born, Western Humanities Review, two girls review, and other publications; a fable is included in Persea Books' Sudden Flash Youth: 65 Short-Short Stories. He has taught writing and literature at the University of Utah, Lewis and Clark College, and other institutions, and has won fellowships and awards from the Ucross Foundation, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs.

Books by Raphael Dagold:

About Bastard Heart:

"Bastard Heart is the most important book of poetry I've read in years. When you read it you are brought back to the body, a word and pulse at a time, reminding you that the heart is a muscle. Its beating beats us up and brings us to life. These poems will bruise you, resuscitate you, love you, bring you to the skin of things over and over again. Raphael Dagold is what I'm going to say in the face of skeptics and cynics from now on. I'll put this book everywhere, without apology."
—Lidia Yuknavitch

"Raphael Dagold's gorgeous collection of poems explores the ways that family and community narratives of pain, hope, loss, self-protection and self-preservation echo powerfully through generations. In Dagold's poems, intense lyricism is fueled by poetic restraint, just as images of wreckage co-exist with beauty, and our awareness of the Jews' traumatic past lives in and alongside of the Jewish diaspora's understanding of the present. But of course, in Bastard Heart, such moments of perception and their attendant definitions of identity would be impossible to isolate or maintain over time, as Dagold shows us that our very bodies are constantly in emotional and physical flux, awake to the realities of both pleasure and pain, the heart--as he informs us in his collection's astonishing title poem--'an unschooled flock, an open house.'"
—Paisley Rekdal