Sixth in the Mountain West Poetry Series, edited by Stephanie G’Schwind & Donald Revell
These poems take us up into the sky and then leave us there, suspended, where we observe the comings and the goings of the beautifully, hauntingly sad: “the stars above, the stars below / and us between.” If there is a poet who can put words to our contemporary sense of isolation—even as we’re surrounded by lovers, children, the good works of the living—it is Goodman, who so cunningly names each sorrow and thus lays it to bed, “until this public sadness / engulfs each private pain.” —Keetje Kuipers
Stunningly musical and stylistically varied, the poems in Hungry Moon have the effect of a flyover view of terrain pocked with domestic and social unease. The reconnaissance we receive—red stuffing spilling out of a child’s cheek torn by a dog, a cello case’s lining “exposed like a body split down the middle”—makes us think there is no safe place to land. But Goodman is expert at steering our gaze to identify landmarks in the natural world to bring us safely down; these sonically rich and surprising poems are lessons in perception, obliging us to look at the world from a distance and then up close, touch what is in front of us, like a stone from a rockslide—“I pick one up, / hold my hand over the black draft, then put it back”—to learn from, and move on. —Curtis Bauer
Henrietta Goodman is the author of Take What You Want, winner of the 2006 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Montana and a PhD in English from Texas Tech University. Her poems have been published in New England Review, Massachusetts Review, and other journals, as well as in the anthologies Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books and A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry. She lives in Missoula, Montana.