Honey and Junk

by Dana Goodyear

Overview

A wry and dark debut of sharply compressed lyrics by a precocious new voice in poetry.

These powerful poems are like wrecked pastorals whose narrator seeks temporary pleasure in wit, form, rhyme, or the borrowed weekend house. Inching toward consolation in the face of sudden loss, the poet examines the reconfigured world. The elegies are like conversations overheard or recounted dreams: full of portent and mystery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393329032
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/17/2006
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Dana Goodyear’s poetry has appeared in several journals, including the Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

What People are Saying About This

J. D. McClatchy

Haunted, ruthless, tender—scary-cool and edgy-smart. . . . The most breathtaking debut in years!

Editorial Reviews

"Haunted, ruthless, tender—scary-cool and edgy-smart. . . . The most breathtaking debut in years!"

J. D. McClatchy

"With talent this apparent, the heart will always have room for more from [Goodyear]."

St. Louis Today

"Despite Goodyear’s gift for wordplay, she is at base not a poet of revenge but one of loss and love—of sentiment frozen by insight. . . . Honey and Junk packs a terrific punch."

New York Times

Since winning the undergraduate's Hopwood Prize at Yale in the late '90s, Goodyear has been pretty much unstoppable, landing first at PW, and then, quickly, at the New Yorker, where she is now a staff writer, and where several of the poems from this debut collection first appeared. They have a stark set of emotional registers that blend lingering anger over parental neglect and divorce ("Mother was never in the same room with any of us./ I think she was a hostess, in which case I should say,/ Thank you for having me") with patrician codes, and the cool accusations, failures, actings out and excitements of current loves. They often read as if a Susan Minot character were channeling Dorothy Parker: "Give the hypothermic girl/ a stiff hot drink./ The mouth of a stranger is a pocket of breathable air./ Its spit is a warm vital flow." All the poems are short and well-calibrated. Some have Dickinson-like formal rhymes that come off as motivated, if not always satisfying ("And human love and unison are null/ when even solitude is terminal"); some are littered with offhand allusions to class trappings that fail to sustain ("Cross-breeze. Swiss dot. View"). Goodyear is at her best when her speaker is at her meanest, which isn't quite often enough, but taken as a whole, her poems perfectly reproduce the claustrophobic atmosphere of love among the ruins of plenty. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Slender but hardly slight, Goodyear's first collection marks the arrival of a highly imaginative and striking voice. Whether she comes off to the reader as candid or merely overconfident, the poet absorbs the world around her with a certain audacity: "If it all seemed endless/ viewed in the three-way mirror/ then I remember the opposite endlessness/ when you were still much clearer." Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal