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BETWEEN SLEEPING & WAKING

BETWEEN SLEEPING & WAKING

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-1-7333400-1-4

Pub Date: Mar. 2020

Pages: 88


By Albert Goldbarth


Sometimes in the Mist

BETWEEN SLEEPING & WAKING

My Ear Against a Wall

in the Brain Stem

Picks Up Other Voices


Albert Goldbarth’s new collection is a community of poems that makes room for other voices than the autobiographical “I”: some fantastical, some historical/celebrity, some the neighbors down the block. The poems themselves offer a rich spectrum of possibilities, from the comic to the grievous, from a poem of five lines to a poem of six pages, but all presented by a poet whose “broad understanding of history and of a wide range of character types allows him to people his writing with everyone from presidents to prostitutes, and from ancient mythmakers to contemporary celebrities—all the while remaining present as a smart and earnest voice."


    When I Say My Sister’s Breasts

    what I mean is: hell,

    they took them away. A knife,

    the chemo, the radiation;

    whatever. To save her. A little

    like the way the animal leaves its paw,

    its gnawed-off paw, in the trap.

    The emperor orders a hundred men and women

    into the valley where enemy soldiers wait

    behind trees . . . so the rest

    of his troops can make a safe retreat.

    A man withdraws his love

    from his daughter, to keep what he thinks

    is the love of the woman he met last month.

    A day is a line we walk, continually

    giving up things to the gods, so they

    might make the line we walk longer


    —Albert Goldbarth

    Albert Goldbarth has been publishing poetry collections of note for forty-five years—two of which have received the National Book Critics Circle Award—from a number of literary-minded presses, including Doubleday, Graywolf Press, the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Lost Horse Press. Individual poems have appeared in hundreds of periodicals from The New Yorker and New York Times Magazine to Kayak and Clown War. A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Poetry Foundation, he lives in Wichita, Kansas.

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