Raphael Dagold’s poems, lyric essays, and photographs have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Southern Review, Blackbird, Tupelo Quarterly, The Offing, North American Review, and The Normal School. Awards include the Mountain States Writers Award in Poetry, the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize, and fellowships from the Jentel Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, among other honors. His first book, Bastard Heart, appeared in 2014, and was a finalist for the Utah Book Award. A second poetry manuscript, Relief Effort, is under review, and a collection of lyric essays and a third poetry manuscript—poems from Kyrgyzstan, where he taught at the American University of Central Asia from 2016-2018—are in the works. He has taught writing and literature at numerous other universities in the U.S. and abroad, and in the fall of 2020, he joined the English faculty at the Morristown-Beard School in Morristown, New Jersey.

POETRY

Community

By RAPHAEL DAGOLD

& ever after, I’ve felt the narrow // passage beside the stroller widen & widen.