Albert Goldbarth has been publishing collections of poetry for over four decades, two of which two have received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His latest, Selfish, was published by Graywolf Press in May 2015. He tests his patience by living in Wichita, Kansas.
Nonfiction
Jan/Feb 2019
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Introduction Her name is Frederica. They call her “Chica Bonita,” “C. B.,” “El Terrible.” Someone also calls her “madre,” someone calls her “hija” — that’s not going to keep her here. She’s […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
Wrist Beep
Once there weren’t even cell phones,hard though it is for a twenty-somethingto credit that—but I remember those days, and we communicated fine. Now, of course, there are phone/computer/location chips the […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2017
A Range of the Watched and the Unwatched
Of radio’s earliest days: “For reasons that seem deeply unfathomable now, [Harold W. Arlin of KDKA] and most other broadcasters developed the custom of donning a tuxedo for evening broadcasts, […]
Winter 2000
January 31, 1998
The week I turn fifty, the President’s busyearnestly deflecting the taint of another sex encounterin an alcove off the Oval Office: “earnestly,” we’d write itif we didn’t believe him; if […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2015
The Story of Up
The gods, the sages of almost all traditions say, are manifest in the smallest of things. The vine of morning glories on a broken fortress wall. The hieroglyphic of rust […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2015
The Secret of the Universe
The Secret of the Universe What if I said “There’s a mole here,” meaning —a common garden or woods mole? —a spy, embedded in the enemy’s camp? —this “beauty mark” […]
Poetry
July/Aug 2015
She Dies and Is Buried and Her People
nomads, by definition move on. And yet. Once evening winds have smoothed the sand between her and her people, there’s no visible link at all. And yet. • • The […]
Nature's Nature: A Gathering of Poetry
May/June 2015
Sea (and Other) Tails
[Bernard de Maillet, eighteenth-century French consul and cosmologist/naturalist claimed that] billions of years ago … a great sea had covered the earth. All life came into being in that ocean. […]
Poetry
Spring 2011
The Point at Which My Wife Enters a Poem about the “National Geographic” Cover Story (November 2009) “Are We Alone?”
—by which it doesn't mean in the bedroom or dining room, but the universe. The answer is a demi-hopeful "possibly not," although whatever other life exists Out There in the […]
Poetry
Spring 2011
Etc.’s Wife
The story is: he peed his seat in English 101, and Dash the security guy was a half hour late so by the time the chair was wheeled down the […]
Poetry
Summer 2009
Everyday People
The oceans are dying. They require a hero, or a generation of heroes. The oceans are curdling in on themselves, and on their constituent lives, they’re rising here, and lowering […]
Poetry
Winter 2008
In Another
The cancer seeded her; and harvested her; and dined off the best and tenderest parts; and he meanwhile grieved and he meanwhile clung for meaning to his work, he was […]
Poetry
Winter 2008
Through the Elements
The distinction between halophilic archaeans and methanosarcina or flavobacteria and gram-positive bacteria clearly will never be a matter of moment for most of us.—Bill Bryson Outside now, a heavying sleet; […]
Poetry
Winter 2008
Secondhand Light
The moon of course—that bank shot of the sun’s. Of course the evanescent rickrack that the sun sews into the lake top. Or a dime of sun that floats the […]
Writing in Code: Literature and the Genome
Winter 2006
Whale and Bee
Earl called today: another fight with Thelma.Who would doubt it?—evolution wants our marriages unlikely. We’re experiments, in search of furtheralloys of the human genome. Fair enough. And yet their sadness […]
Writing in Code: Literature and the Genome
Winter 2006
Voyage
Sometimes I wake up with the sheet soaking wet.—Bruce Springsteen The banditos of the inner region would take not onlyyour money but, with little provocation, your throat—their dogs were said […]
Poetry
Summer 2004
Ötzi
I sing of the fake claim to history —the counterfeit tree that says one’s root is royal, or holy, or indisputably native, and therefore so is the current flowering of […]
Poetry
Summer 2004
The Spices
No, it’s not “the painting”—not the noun of it— that serves now to remind her of her day. In fact the scene in its frame, the scene in all its […]
Poetry
Winter 2004
The Feelers
His plays scourge our society. A two-hour monologue literally flattened me by the end, and in fact did bring on a fever, so that I had to lie down, […]
Poetry
Winter 2004
Five Pounds
This non-aerosol prayer dates from the forties. —The Inside Collector 1. But aren’t all prayers aerosol?—they leave in a breath, and rise through air, as air, until they finally reach […]
Poetry
Summer 2002
The Splinter Groups of Breakfast
1. Not even nothing existed yet. Emptiness, even, didn't exist. And He-who-by-definition-precedeth-nothing said—well, you know what He said, in that grandiloquent King James way of speaking. And there was light. […]
Poetry
Winter 2000
January 31, 1998
The week I turn fifty, the President’s busyearnestly deflecting the taint of another sex encounterin an alcove off the Oval Office: “earnestly,” we’d write itif we didn’t believe him; if […]
Poetry
Winter 1998
The Fiction Shelf
The Swiss watch isn’t ticking for a week, before a credible Hong Kong knockoff’s on the market. Fraud has always been a close, close shadow. A blink or two after […]
Poetry
Summer/ Autumn 1997
***!!!The Battle of the Century!!!***
the handbills shrill, in searing orange-crimsons. Any century. There will always be these two opponents, circling for a throat-hold. Call them Plus; and Minus. Call them Void; and Matter (from […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
Halfway: Definitions
The mouth of the thing is larger than the hovelssome of these butcherers and gawkers call a home —this whale, stranded in its 1598 engravingpitifully feet away from the ale-foam […]
Poetry
Summer 1996
In
the text: & then the author’s life behind the text: & then the preexisting psychic fundament behind that: always further layers penetrable or not: the word & […]
Science, Science Fiction and Poetry
Autumn 1993
The Future
When I was five or six—so this would be around 1954—we’d drive out to the airport on occasional weekend nights, for entertainment. It was cheap, that may have been its […]
Introduction
Spring 1990
‘Imp Your, Dahlink?’
Many of us know these kreatures well: The mouse hates the kat; the kat is the mouse’s nemesis. Every day, zealous, the mouse hurls a missile from Kolin Kelly’s brickyard […]
Nonfiction
Spring 1990
Delft: An Essay-Poem
No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it. Herman Melville He cometh unto his kingdom now. Yea, he […]
Poetry
Autumn 1989
Radio Baseball
1. Establishing Poles There’s a rhythmic dip and uplilt to the freshly marcelled hair of these secretaries in the 1930s (early enough, I think, that they would still be called […]
Poetry
Autumn 1989
Toil,
rhymes with soil. The craftsman Snedjem and his wife are—in the painting at Deir el-Medina—workingthe land. A lower register shows them plowing (toil also half-rhymes till) with the typical horn-yoked […]
Poetry
Autumn 1989
Burnt Offering
Rembrandt’s friend, the physician Tulp, writes of “a distinguished painter [who] was under the delusion that all the bones of his body had softened to such a flexibility that they […]
Personally Speaking
Spring 1984
Fuller
1 She worked with burnt hands. Burnt, in a way, from the inside out. The tips were fine-cracked like old paintings. And she’d been working today, again, from even before […]
Poetry
Winter 1983
The Lines
Jean answers. Bob isn’t home. But would I like Arlene to say hello? Great. Prime-time long-distance rates and I have to wait while Arlene decides if the receiver is something […]
Poetry
Winter 1983
Most Glow / Vessel
1 In the hickburg airport, a crucifix once past the guards and bleepers became an unscabbarded dagger at a throat. You bet they check every metal mote now!, so a […]
Fiction
Winter 1981
Ellen’s
1 Turning and turning in the guiding wire * The phone rings. Collect, long distance. “Albert it’s Ellen I’m in Kalamazoo and singing in the park” “Kalamazoo?” “by the fountain. […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1980
Notebook
for my friends Finally it reached reversal: my life was broke down, not my car. And so I drove—I wanted the little left, that still worked, to take me to […]
Poetry
Summer 1979
Carrell / Klee / & Cosmos’s Groom
to remain outside history in order to evade the consequences. . . since disasters occur only in historical time VINTILA HORA 1. The phone, against the lamplight, is a “truncated […]
Spring 2011
Photographs of the Interiors of Dictators’ Houses
It’s as if every demon from hell with aspirations toward interior design flew overhead and indiscriminately spouted gouts of molten gold, that cooled down into swan-shape spigots, doorknobs, pen-and-inkwell sets. […]