The not-at-all-everyday new poetry collection by Albert Goldbarth, twice winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award
Everyday People
Poems
- “[Goldbarth] continues his essential commentary on scientific knowledge fused with human passion. He is a secular prophet.”—The Kansas City Star
I brought a book of many words
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it.
—from “What We Were Like”
Virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth returns with a new collection that describes the wonders of everyday people—overprotective parents, online gamblers, newlyweds, Hercules, and Jesus. In Goldbarth’s poetry—expansive, wild, and hilarious—he argues that our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to, giving thanks for. Everyday People is an extraordinary new book by a poet who “in thirty-five years of writing has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation.”—William Doreski, The Harvard Review
to an emptiness in my heart,
and I shook them out in there, to fill it.
In my time I wrote this very thing.
In your time you read it.
—from “What We Were Like”
Virtuoso poet Albert Goldbarth returns with a new collection that describes the wonders of everyday people—overprotective parents, online gamblers, newlyweds, Hercules, and Jesus. In Goldbarth’s poetry—expansive, wild, and hilarious—he argues that our ordinary failures, heroics, joy, and grief are worth giving voice to, giving thanks for. Everyday People is an extraordinary new book by a poet who “in thirty-five years of writing has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation.”—William Doreski, The Harvard Review
$18.00
About the Author
Credit: Michael Pointer
Praise
- “Again Goldbarth directs his amazing collection of little-known facts toward the same simple truths: people fall in and out of love, grow old, die, and hope to be remembered.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
- “Trust Goldbarth, with his recklessly rich, culturally acute writing, to capture everything from helicopter parents to Hercules.”—Library Journal
- “[Goldbarth] infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals.”—The Rumpus
- “Blending the antediluvian with the contemporary, Everyday People does markedly well in revealing what its author sees as the ‘secret life in everything.’”—Time Out New York
