Googootz and Other Poems

by Howard Faerstein

Overview

The poems in Howard Faerstein's Googootz and Other Poems journey by their own inimitable logic, finding their way as they go, because "you keep travelling on / whether life invites you or not." In this wide-ranging volume of praise and protest, subtle humor and elegy, finches fly through fire, Hiroshima shadows a New England beach, space aliens reveal a secret connection to spaghetti and meatballs, a wasp and wind chimes conjure mystery "outside the borders of definition," and seemingly respectable citizens harbor "cavernous hate camouflaged like terrorist conviction." Even as Faerstein confronts the worst of our current moment, these poems "never refuse love's lure," never forget "the great glory" of creation. Googootz is a large-souled book that gives courage to "go on living." --Jay Udall, author of The Welcome Table and Because a Fire in Our Heads, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Prize

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941209943
Publisher:	Press 53
Publication date:	10/01/2018
Pages:	118
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.28(d)

Table of Contents

I

Salamandrine Fire

Opening Day

Jamaica Bay

Lace

The Blind Finch

If an Okra Stalk

We Have Ten Toes

Provincetown

Bob’s Birch

Standing on the Front Steps

You Ask How I Describe You to My Friends

Talking to Myself, I Often Say We, as in We Should Shower Now

Cooleyville Road

The Duck Soup Had Consequences

Beethoven’s Ninth

Wedding Day at Corn Hill Beach

Still Life with Land and Water

Victory

I Had Buckets

II

The Three Sisters

Splintering

What if There Is No Smoke

Spaghetti & Meatballs

Googootz

Straight Life

In Plain Sight

Exercises for Freshman Comp

A Visit to Stern Country

Discussing Punctuation in C. D. Wright’s “Day-Old Widow Poem”

Hiking Engineer Mountain with Friends

1968—Patchouli

After Joel Oppenheimer’s Reading

Folk Song

Where Are the Relief Pitchers

Feverfew

The Winter of ’01

[What a Sunday!]

Switchbacks

Pura Vida

Dominical

Cross-Country Drive at Fifty-five

III

Unfathomable

View from Monhegan Island

Reportage—Summer 2016

Where It Comes From

Ruthless Season

Hung Jury

The Moment

Bagay La

IV

Bricolage

The Bears of Florence, Massachusetts

At the Locust Street Dump

Flying Through Fire

Godmother Goldie

Morris

Passover

Jupiter Island

Moby—The White Cat

Circumstances Surrounding Your Death

In the Balance

Girl on the Beach, 1957

Akshata

Spellbound

Nobody Fishing

Kevin

Exit Only

Ira at Work

The Wasp and the Unicorn

To the Wary Fox Sparrow Rustling in the Leaf Litter

Editorial Reviews

In Googootz and Other Poems, Howard Faerstein meets the world with unabashed frankness and an intelligence both empathic and zapping. “Three generations from now / will the wren wheedle still? / Will wasps gorge on fallen fruit?” the poet wonders amid the ruinous violence (including that sprung from racism, classism, and homophobia) we inflict on others and ourselves. Carl Sagan’s suggestion that “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love” seems particularly relevant in times like ours when, as Faerstein insists, “misery like rapture ascends / as quickly as frost in mid-spring.” The poet’s heartache for the world’s raw wounds is as intense as his unflinching love for its shards of beauty. We might as well “wrap / gauze around the whole / bloody planet,” the poet grieves, while also urging us to celebrate the feverfew “growing out of the gutter,” the “sibilant warbling / of the dead,” the hatchlings of the macheted terciopelo “spreading out / in the early light / like stars / blinking forth / at dusk.” Like the luscious googootz, Faerstein’s voice nourishes and surprises. Savor it to the max and share. —Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Immigrant Model and Father Dirt

The poems in Howard Faerstein’s Googootz and Other Poems journey by their own inimitable logic, finding their way as they go, because “you keep travelling on / whether life invites you or not.” In this wide-ranging volume of praise and protest, subtle humor and elegy, finches fly through fire, Hiroshima shadows a New England beach, space aliens reveal a secret connection to spaghetti and meatballs, a wasp and wind chimes conjure mystery “outside the borders of definition,” and seemingly respectable citizens harbor “cavernous hate camouflaged like terrorist conviction.” Even as Faerstein confronts the worst of our current moment, these poems “never refuse love’s lure,” never forget “the great glory” of creation. Googootz is a large-souled book that gives courage to “go on living.” —Jay Udall, author of The Welcome Table and Because a Fire in Our Heads, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Prize

From the Publisher