Poetry Collection. Winner of the 1999 Frank O'Hara Award Chapbook Prize, selected by William Reichard.
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"All my stories eventually dissolve," Brent Goodman says in "Cold War," one of the sixteen poems that comprise this lyrical and often haunting collection, yet these stories stay with you long after you've finished reading. Goodman has built a collection of poems filled with lush, fragmentary images, with the ghosts that appear first in "The Commute," the opening poem, and continue to flash into and out of visibility throughout the chapbook.
"If we follow instructions and listen to the sky / we will survive," he says in "Duck and Cover," and in some ways, this book serves as a set of instructions, directions for finding our way through the known and the unknown worlds. In "Amnesia," a man becomes lost in his own, familiar world, while in "Chanukah," the narrator expresses an understated faith, one tempered by reason and experience.
What impresses most about Wrong Horoscope is the way in which Brent Goodman allows belief and doubt, celebration and tragedy, to exist within the same collection, within each poem. This is a poet who understands subtlety, who fills his poems with emotion, yet does not manipulate emotion or hand over any easy answers. This is a collection that explores and tries to map out the often shadowy territories of love and loss, of human connection and disconnection. The poems here come to rest where conflict rests, where contradiction is the necessary rule. Goodman is a poet of nuance, iron-strong and delicate. Wrong Horoscope is a lovely collection. -- William Reichard, Judge. 1999 Frank O'Hara Award Chapbook Competition
About the Author
Brent Goodman was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1971. After several years living out of state while finishing an MA in Creative Writing at Purdue Universiy ('95), he's currently working as a copywriter for an audio manufacturer in Madison. His work has appeared in many journals, including Poetry, Green Mountains Review, Passages North, Tampa Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Poetry East. Another collection, Trees are the Slowest Rivers, won the 1998 Sarasota Poetry Theatre Chapbook Competition as well as a 1998 Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the Wisconsin Arts Board.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
"It's my cat who teaches me Zen.",
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This review is from: Wrong Horoscope (Paperback)
The first poem by Brent Goodman that I read was titled "The Brother Swimming Beneath Me" and appeared in "Poetry" magazine. Nothing in this chapbook has quite the intensity of that masterpiece, but Goodman has a wonderful eye for odd details and odd circumstances (a newspaper's misprinting of the horoscope column, messages left on an answering machine bought at a yard sale), as well as a wry sense of humor. He is a poet well worth reading, and well worth keeping an eye on.
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