To Be Read in 500 Years

by Albert Goldbarth

Overview

So often (let's be honest here) we poets will invent dreams, for our own strategic purposes.
But this one is real, and one of the few
I remember. I awoke in the future.
—from "Mailbox"

To Be Read in 500 Years is the poet Albert Goldbarth's time capsule for a future that none of us can now imagine—a world without mailboxes, without sexual reproduction, without oil or tillable soil, without the capacity to understand music or poetry or "love love love love crazy love." Goldbarth's smart and nostalgic collection of poems, spoken from that future's distant past, reminds us of everything we have to lose.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555975258
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	04/27/2009
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Albert Goldbarth is the author of twenty-five collections of poetry, including The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972–2007. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.

Editorial Reviews

Albert Goldbarth is a poet of remarkable gifts—a dazzling virtuoso who can break your heart.” —Joyce Carol Oates

“Albert Goldbarth just may be the American poet of his generation for the ages. Often humorous but always serious, Goldbarth combines erudite research, pop-culture fanaticism, and personal anecdote in ways that make his writings among the most stylistically recognizable in the literary world.” —Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review

“In thirty-five years of writing, Albert Goldbarth has amassed a body of work as substantial and intelligent as that of anyone in his generation.” —William Doreski, The Harvard Review

From the Publisher

Goldbarth's ample output, frequently comic effects, reader-friendly free verse and almost dauntingly omnivorous reference-from Roman history to cardiology to 1950s science fiction-have slowed down what might otherwise be the widespread acknowledgment of an American master: that has started to change (he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2002) and might change further with this 25th book of verse. Here is "my shtick/ and my stump-speech exhortation to you, delivered in spittle/ and neural knot-ways," part of a seven-page poem that advises, again and again, "Keep a dream journal." Elsewhere is a five-part poem that seeks, through facts from William Carlos Williams's biography, modern cosmology and 19th-century typesetting, the mysteries of "whatever/ you call it, animus, or consciousness-the 'soul.'A " The sciences, "The Writing Life" and "Everything" make repeated appearances in Goldbarth's fast-paced lines. Yet for all his oddball flights, all his "waggly buggish-visaged aliens" and the like, Goldbarth returns, most of the time, to first and last things-to why some marriages (his own, for example) last: to how we deal with parents and friends who fall ill; to how we get all we can, and more than we know, out of life and out of death. (May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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