FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEMarch 18, 2009
Brent Goodman’s Poetry Collection THE BROTHER SWIMMING BENEATH ME Published by Black Lawrence Press
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me is not just about loss, grief, a brother who succumbs to complications of leukemia at a young age. The poems within are also about addiction, sexual identity, enlightenment, jazz, Paris, and the Iraq War. A plate full of oysters, robots, and Moses also make cameo appearances. But swimming beneath all of these images and themes is the brother. The brother is of, beneath, and a part of each element of the collection.
Brent Goodman lives and writes outside of academia, monastically isolated in Wisconsin’s north woods. The Brother Swimming Beneath Me is not a book of riotous, clanging city poems. It is not even a book of whirring, ordered suburban poems. Rather, it is a book of deep introspection. It is not about living in the forest; instead, it is a book born of the physical and mental space that can be found there. Poems in The Brother Swimming Beneath Me range from formal sonnets to relaxed journal entries, sparse lyrics to nonce-form prose poems.
Brent Goodman earned an MFA from Purdue University in 1996, and published two chapbooks in 1999. He took a hiatus from writing poetry between 2002 and 2006. The Brother Swimming Beneath Me his first full-length collection.
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me can be ordered online via blacklawrencepress.com.
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Please contact Diane Goettel at dianegoettel@gmail.com to for media inquiries and review copies. Brent Goodman is available for both speaking engagements and interviews.
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me
(Black Lawrence Press, 2009)
"In the first line of The Brother Swimming Beneath Me, his long-awaited and stunning debut collection, Brent Goodman announces: "There is no afterlife." But there is: in poem after poem "the eye plays beautiful tricks" with everything it witnesses, and the past is resurrected in mind and heart. The book as a whole, not just its opening poem, becomes a potent secular prayer, one with sorrow at its heart. For a brother's early death haunts this book, and radiates out from the dazzling title poem at its center to cast its shadow on everything. Yet the author's firm craft and uncommonly mature vision transform loss to a complex, buoyant beauty. The wealth of physical experience is attended to so alertly that it merges, finally, with the spiritual. Technically, these impressively shaped poems range from experiments in prose to fluent sonnets; thematically, they explore brotherly love in just about every imaginable sense. The poems are as rich with delight as with wisdom, and like the good musician he also is, Goodman makes the difficult look natural."
~~~~~~~~- David Graham
"This is utterly coherent, honed, incisive, articulate & often daring work. There's a full self here, eager to learn & survive, to make sense out of complex longing & grief by intimately evolving with them. Something's truly at stake, in the shorter opening pieces (especially the "Wisconsin Triptych"), the haunting brother narratives with their surging variations which ground the book, & the final expressionist proems which despite their struggle through darkness I find immensely energizing & joyous....This is really extraordinary work."
~~~~~~~~- Neil N. Myers
"In these poems of disquiet and brilliant light, Brent Goodman gives us grief and gravel roads, love and not love, work, rage, war. There is pain here, and wiseass joy in these seldom visited places where the heart gives way and it's the mind – furious, honest, playful, intent – that knows compassion and reason and giving up reason. From the very first poem – be warned. Surprise lives in this book, fierce verve and tenderness. “Will the congregation please/recite what this wall of stained glass/is trying to tell you?” this poet writes. “Dear Buddha,/I've been knocking from the inside.”
~~~~~~~~- Marianne Boruch
"The Brother Swimming Beneath Me offers a terrific variety of pleasures, taking up many different forms and tones and a tremendous diversity of subjects, from the deeply serious to the delightfully whimsical. What strikes me most, though, is the intense purposefulness which underlies and unifies this work. Goodman knows that "We might never find the right words / to carry what we're trying to exactly say." But he also knows, and amply demonstrates, how deeply necessary it is that we keep trying."
~~~~~~~~- Joel Brouwer
