From Booklist
Goldbarth is the author of a number of exceedingly well-received poetry books, including Marriage and Other Science Fiction, 1995. The full range of his considerable talent is on brilliant display in this thematic compilation that gathers together more than two decades' worth of his poems about being Jewish, Jewish history, and his own family and childhood. Goldbarth's robust poems are built of long, sinewy, embracing lines and filled with pungent irreverence, trustworthy masculinity, and profound affection. The strength of his voice does not, however, belie delicacy of thought, nimbleness of imagery, or emotional vulnerability. Goldbarth's take on Jewishness is engagingly anecdotal as he reinterprets the tales of the Old Testament, considers the implications of the Holocaust, and describes Jewish life in America as it has filtered through Ellis Island to grocery stores, Hebrew schools, universities, and beyond. Goldbarth succeeds not only in entertaining and moving his readers but in perfectly evoking the meld of faith and legacy that is modern Judaism. Donna Seaman
Review
Goldbarth was born and raised in Chicago, and many of his autobiographical lyrics concern Jewish family life, with its beginnings in immigration, its decimation by the Holocaust, its religious rituals, its kinship relations, its social presence. Goldbarth writes as one who has left that life but wishes to perpetuate it as it recedes....What is most exhilarating about reading Goldbarth is the constant surprise one encounters on each page as the poem continues a protean development, unforeseen and beautiful, of its basic premises. --Helen Vendler, from introductory comments in Harper American Literature
