ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Carlie Hoffman is the author of two forthcoming poetry collections, This Alaska (Four Way Books, 2021) and Only if We Stay (Four Way Books, 2023). A poet and translator, her honors include a 92Y Discovery / Boston Review Poetry Prize and a Poet’s & Writer’s Amy Award. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Missouri Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. Carlie is the Editor-in-Chief of Small Orange Journal. Originally from New Jersey, Carlie currently lives in Brooklyn and teaches poetry in the undergraduate creative writing program at Purchase College, SUNY.
Into the Waters of Kindness: On Nicholas Goodly’s Black Swim
Black Swim
by Nicholas Goodly
Poetry Society of America, 2018
“I am looking for a man who believes in everything / from chewing to star,” writes Nicholas Goodly in their debut chapbook, Black Swim (Poetry Society of America, 2018), which won the 2017 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Through their original imagery, mysticism, and deep insight, Nicholas’s poems are a lyricism that recharge the English language. The poems brilliantly resist categorization and an I/it relationship between human beings and nature. When the poet “makes [their] own man” of the south, interrogating systemic racism and the gendered concept “he-man,” they do so with river history and fishnetted legs, reimagining grace. Nicholas ingeniously moves within structures and systems to complicate, query, and reinvent with real empathy and humanity. Black Swim gifts us a renewed hope in believing a kinder future by way of healing one another through love and imagination. Nicholas makes new Emily Dickinson’s wish for “a kinder sea,” showing another aspect of what America’s potential could be. The poet is a seer with “ten seeing fingers” that transform the damage of the ready-made world. 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.
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Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
