BLACK SWIM (CHAPBOOK)
Winner of 2017 PSA Chapbook Fellowship
Selected by Brenda Shaughnessy
When this poet puts on necklaces, drinks, names, dreams, grieves, dances, desires, judges, hopes,lives, dives, the reader is not veering between poles, aware of how skillfully the poet lyrically narrates, how self and strangeness orbit. The reader is learning for the first time how Goodly wraps himself around everything we can do in this human life and names it, caresses it, disciplines it, sets it free.
-Excerpt from Introduction
by Brenda Shaughnessy
Nicholas Goodly’s poems are a “recipe for geranium eyes” that deliver us again and again, “vulgar and backward,” into the waters of kindness, divine knowledge, and a true and essential American heart.
-Excerpt from Into the Waters of Kindness:
On Nicholas Goodly’s Black Swim
by Carlie Hoffman
Glass: A Journal of Poetry