“In this stunning volume, Janlori Goldman undertakes a searching expedition, on which some world histories are visited, and old traumas brought home and repossessed. The center of this journey is a searing “crown of sonnets” that enlarges the literature of that demanding form. Poem by poem, even as we watch, Goldman transmutes the raw nectar of living into the honey of a deeply moving art.”
-Suzanne R. Hoover, PhD, Literary Scholar and Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Writing Program
“In the poems of My Antarctica, Janlori Goldman is on the move, engaged in exploring the terms of the heroic quest as she ranges over longitudes and latitudes of the imagination, from fraught interior landscapes of childhood to a rediscovered and riskily renovated home place and the far pole of peril and inner discovery. The poet embodies her own exploration, seeking to “chart my own geography,/how the body rises up/and away from itself.” She defines her destination as a journey: “I can split, be my own/fork in the road, lichen/growing over its gash,/or be the border wall/that guides my hand.” These poems lead us to lay claim to our own hearts.
-David Groff, author of Clay
White Pine Press, 2017
Chosen by Laure-Anne Bosselaar for the 2016 White Pine Press Poetry Prize.
“At the Cubbyhole Bar” chosen for the Raynes Poetry Prize by Gerald Stern.
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“In this fine book, an intimate, tender voice tells of a life of sensual gladness, as well as loneliness and grief, most often redeemed by the courage and kindness of women. The poems most often pay attention to neglected people and neglected truths, often neglected moments, often in the beauty of the earth. Several among them, ‘At the Cubby Hole Bar’ and ‘Emergency Room,’ describe the kind of holy moments that give us goose flesh.”
-Jean Valentine
“Seldom have I seen a book of poems so vital in its storytelling, so rich and precise in imagery and metaphor, and at the same time so full of heart and compassion. Like the flocks of starlings Janlori Goldman watches at dusk, she is herself ‘a glimmer sign that all is not lost.’”
-Alicia Ostriker
“Through her fervent lyrics, delightful odes and image-rich narratives, Janlori Goldman invites us into her world—and it is a deeply moving one. With fluid, vivid clarity, she valiantly stares at the past, and faces the present with a compelling mix of temerity and tenderness. Hers is a remarkable voice that is all at once passionate and exquisitely subtle. One leafs through Goldman’s book as one would amble through a museum, stopping for a detail here, an image there, perfectly happy to spend long hours ‘in that space, immersed in color and line.’”
-Laure-Anne Bosselaar
“‘I wanted my words to come closer than those of other poets,’ Eugenio Montale said, and added, ‘closer to what?’ Poets use words to make experience come alive, but language encodes it. Montale yearned for ‘the end of the illusion of the world as representation.’ Janlori Goldman’s exquisite poems enter a world which is immediate beyond rhetoric —’walnuts fall, still in their shell’s shell.’ It’s a place of visceral danger, on the cusp of vanishing itself, but the ‘last month’ is just before birth. Goldman’s lines quicken with the pulse of a singular life. The vision is intimate and the lyricism grounded. ‘I’m as close to god as I’ll ever come/or want to be,’ Goldman writes; the sacred is everywhere, but it’s human, raw, confounding, a homeless stranger who doesn’t happen to be hungry, sleeping in a window well,‘her sneakers on the sidewalk/like slippers by a bed.’ Bread from a Stranger’s Oven is a book of stunning ambition and accomplishment.”
-D. Nurkse
Cover Art by: Kristin Flynn