Winner of the Golden Boar Book Awards
Poetry Book of the Year 2021Winner at the Los Angeles Book Festival 2022 Poetry Category
Small Sovereign
Poems by Michael Favala Goldman
Homestead Lighthouse Press
ISBN: 978-1-950475-17-9
105 pages
In Small Sovereign, his second full-length collection, poet Michael Favala Goldman draws on experience as a remodeling carpenter, a jazz musician, a Danish translator, a gardener and a parent, to draw us into greater awareness of life’s minute pains and victories from numerous points of view.
“We are all sharing atoms, at least/…/like the sea mixes with the sky/words do not keep them apart.” The poems explore the paradox of personal power and powerlessness, using everyday experience as a door to the universal. “The organization has its priorities/which do not include delight.”
Goldman invites the reader to join him in mundane and transformational experiences, such as picking up a hurt elk, walking by a train-car diner, riding an escalator, touring fields of Verona, making soup for a sick friend, gluing a broken table, and choosing flooring. “All that separates you/from your surroundings/is your imagination/of yourself being who you are.”
The poems of Small Sovereign are short, direct, ironic, touching, and get richer with multiple readings. “don’t expect me to stand in the way/I’m small everywhere/except in my little life/where I am a clumsy giant/trying desperately not/to destroy my own city.”
As a collection, the poems inhabit the space between the material world and emotion-based relationships, placing ourselves starkly in this gap, with the responsibility for bridging it, amid progress and failures: “it’s almost too much, growing/a love that consumes everything.”
Small Sovereign will be a guide for you, out on that wild and marvelous edge which is your life.
