Other Worlds

Description

Other Worlds is true to its title, from a look at our everyday joys and griefs as interpreted by the Mars of classic science fiction and the crazy domain of quantum physics; to studies of the many conflicting realities that America uneasily accommodates in a time of pandemic and protests; to elegiac poems informed by the realms of memory, ghosts, and imagined afterlives. From a poem of one line to a sequence of twelve sections, from comic hijinks to despair, and from private revelation to public declaiming, this is a bravura performance by the only poet to have twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award and who, at age seventy-three, is writing at the height of his powers. Past praise for Albert Goldbarth: “Albert Goldbarth has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation.” —Harvard Review  
“What makes Goldbarth’s best poems irresistibly memorable is not their dizzying profusion but their heroic efforts on behalf of memory itself. It’s this thirst to get everything down, to plumb the recesses of psyche and history alike, that gives his roustabout verse its authentic tenderness and tragi-comedic amplitude.” —Poetry Magazine   Albert Goldbarth has been publishing books for nearly fifty years. He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Saving Lives and for Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, the only poet to receive the honor two times. Goldbarth’s other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Milt Kessler Award. His work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry and multiple appearances in The Best American Poetry series and The Pushcart Prize. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. FROM “LAST SONG”  
I choose the other way,
with heels dug in.
I vote for screaming
 
yearningly. For heading into the afterlife
against the grain of this one. For a slowing down
to the pace of a person too absorbed
in the glory and grit
to work up any hurry for departing it.