Review by Booklist Review
Goldbarth has traveled long and far in the poetry landscape, publishing more than 25 collections; receiving major awards, including two from the National Book Critics Circle and the Poetry Foundation's Mark Twain Poetry Award; teaching a generation of students; and creating an original, far-reaching, exciting, and rewarding aesthetic. He brings his great fluency and wit to this colloquial, contemplative collection. As the title suggests, he places himself at the center of his universe in his lively and moving prose poems, which are filled with rich word play. Goldbarth hits the standard themes: the past, his wife, his father, Jewish custom, and, most pleasingly, his keen insights into language itself. He asks where words come from, how they develop, what they mean mostly, what they mean to him. But he isn't heavy handed, his poems are fun: her boogie-and-Beethoven bootie-beat / is mucho inescapably infectious, and my own voice a karaoke trickle now. Yet the waggish lines in Selfish deliver far more than just a chuckle.--Eleveld, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Irrepressibly exuberant and well known for being prolific, Goldbarth (Everyday People) delivers another big set of verse essays, free associations, and reactions to "this popcult free-for-all-this achronologica/ dice-and-resplice American shmooshed-up everynow." It's an expansive collocation of long-lined poems into which anything at all might fit: "alchemical alembics/ burbling with eggy messes, opera, rap,/ orgasms, caesarian births, blown glass." Though the omnivorous unpredictability gives the poetry much of its charm, Goldbarth fans will recognize frequent themes: his father, his Jewish immigrant background, his childhood; pulp science fiction and early comic book superheroes; popular science, from astrophysics to molecular biology; assorted sex workers; the poet's friends; the friends' troubled marriages; cancer, and recovery from it; Skyler, the poet's admirable wife. The very short poems and the work in the voice of other characters, such as a monk who lived inside a beached whale, may come as a surprise to those not familiar with all of Goldbarth's work. After 27 books of poetry, Goldbarth, a two-time winner of the NBCC award for poetry, still loves the profusion of things and people in the world, and the words for them: "a manticore, a belvedere, a merkin, a firkin." Yet sex, death, love, memory-the usual suspects-are never far under the surface. If the Museum of All Things Goldbarth may seem overcrowded, the exhibits are still astonishing, and worth the trip. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Long before we had the Internet of Everything there was the "smooshed-up evernow" of Goldbarth's poetic canon, in which nothing is excluded, all things are connected, past coexists with present, and the cosmos itself comfortingly embodies "the replication/ of our lives in vaster patterns." As the title of this follow-up to 2012's -Everyday People suggests, its overall theme is the discovery and comprehension of identity, the self itself, as set within the frenetic tumble of science, history, metaphysics, pop culture, and personal experience that has characterized the poet's work for four decades. Motivated by an intense desire to know the world "preceding my own umbilical cord," Goldbarth comes to realize that the decentered universe encompasses an infinite multitude of coexistent centers: "All of us: individual styles." VERDICT Approaching 70, Goldbarth retains the youthful enthusiasm, sense of wonder, and verbal adventurism his readers expect, doing his best to create poems that are "bridges, alchemical alembics/ burbling with eggy messes, opera, rap,/ orgasms, caesarian births, blown glass." Not all succeed, but those that do offer an abundance of surprise and delight.-Fred -Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
