No One I’ve Heard Of

$23.00

No One I’ve Heard Of is a work spanning ten poetry collections, containing selections from Goldman’s first nine books, plus an entirely new tenth collection. The selected poems feel fresh in their new binding, rife with the irony and pensiveness we have come to love in Goldman’s writing, while the new poems are like a treasure on each page, spanning childhood, nature, loss, creativity, family, failures and joy. Goldman is also a musician and a translator, which shows up in his writing as flow where flow is appropriate, and also stopping short when the writing dictates. His attention to each word, each comma, each shape and space shows his dedication to the craft. This is the essential collection of Goldman’s poetry.

Spuyten Duyvil Press
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-9699000-25-9

The title No One I’ve Heard Of alludes to the theme of identity, which appears repeatedly in these new and selected poems.

We are all discovering ourselves as we go, and our identities change as we reveal more of who we are to ourselves and to those around us.

There can also be long periods of denial, where we think of ourselves one way, and eventually find that there is more to us than that after all.

“My discomfort is my own.
Everything around me seems
perfectly content being where it is.”

And it’s not all pretty. The unfolding, the doubt, the coming to terms with self-sabotage, and the confrontation with reality can be jarring.

What better companions to our precarious journeys than poems like these that understand the difficulties, that empathize with us, that we can see ourselves mirrored in.

In the title poem Goldman writes: /No one I’ve heard of/ makes it out of childhood unharmed/just degrees of severity/ adapting to the depths of wounds/

These are poems for celebrating imperfection, with gratitude for the reality in which we actually live.