Never Be the Horse

$14.95

by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Pages: 65; Size: 6″ x 9″
Series: Akron Series in Poetry

Description

Winner of the 1998 Akron Poetry Prize

Never Be the Horse depicts the world of a postmodern Dark Dorothy whose attempts to return home are foiled when she falls into the Garden of Eden, into the underworld with Walt Whitman, into mysterious versions of her own childhood. The poems evoke this nighttime within the self haunted by mythic and shadow-paradises—of home, homeland, the original garden—where “every story is made to hide / the others.” Here, Adam slips on a piece of Eve’s clothing, a child falls in love with the bomb, and a mourner watching the whores chased from the cemetery laments. It is also a world of erotic disguises.

Still, it remains recognizably this world. The parent lies to the child about death, and the child lies to the parent about death. In the journey between those lies, as in the journey taken by the horse of the title, language becomes the place of refuge. It is there that “one world is always beginning.” From “willingness . . . speaking its motherese,” to the devil’s “gossamer gibber,” the voices in these poems discover that to be human is, as Heidegger said, “to be a conversation.”

About the author

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Beckian Fritz Goldberg is an associate professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. She received a BA and MA in English at Arizona State University and took an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, such as The Best American Poetry 1995 and Fever Dreams: Contemporary Arizona Poetry. She has received several prizes for her work, including a 1998 Pushcart Prize and the Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Award. One of her previous books, Never Be the Horse, was the winner of the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize.

Other books by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Additional information

Binding

Paperback

Series

Akron Series in Poetry

Author(s)

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Pub Date

1999

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