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The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007

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Award winning poet, essays and novelist Albert Goldbarth is an accomplished and prolific writer whose distinctive voice showcases one of the best and most imaginatively original minds creating literature today. A highly recommended and core contribution to personal, academic, and community library poetry collections, "The Kitchen Sink: New & Selected Poems 1972-2007 is a retrospective of his signature verse that spans a career of more than thirty-five years. "A Photo of a Lover from My Junior Year in College": Or the Earth: One half in sun,/one half in darkness.//The planet can be its two selves at once./Not us; we're either asleep, or awake.//We're either walking over the countless graves,/or in them. Here, or there.//We rarely pay attention to the moment of transition./Blood, being oxygenated. Love, when it's still just chemicals.//She has one of her arms in an arm of her blouse,/and the other one wonderfully not.

Albert Goldbarth is a national treasure. Excessive, sassy, bold, brilliant, funny, goofy, tender, lyrical, and crafty, Goldbarth's poems often make me feel as if, starving for nourishment, I have stumbled onto the most scrumptious, unending buffet in the world. It's strictly all-you-can-eat at this bar, and you'll never run out of something new to try.

When I started reading Goldbarth in the Seventies, I sometimes thought of the late A. R. Ammons, but Goldbarth out-Ammons even Ammons. Our current poet takes to heart the conviction that everybody and every thing in this unkempt, diverse world of ours deserves poetry about it. Goldbarth expansively provides poems about people and subjects that most other poets won't touch. That's his glory, and our good fortune.

Read this book and share it with everyone you know, especially those who think poetry doesn't concern itself with the real worlds they live in.

--Robert McDowell, author of a book due out later this year on poetry in spiritual practice.