In his latest collection, the incomparable Albert Goldbarth explores all things "self-ish": the origins of identity, the search for ancestry, the neurology of self-awareness, and the line between "self" and "other." Whether one line long or ten pages, whether uproariously comic or steeped in gravitas, these are poems that address our human essence.
Lineage(s) -- Snow -- Lineage -- On the Way -- Metonymy -- Liquid -- His Creatures -- The Stem -- The Disappearance of the Nature Poem into the Nature Poem -- Keats's Phrase -- Smith's Cloud -- Snow and Air and Irving -- Song -- Everyday Life on Planet Albert -- Secondary -- Noon -- Jung/Malena/Darwin -- Deep Ink -- Big Things -- Our Reference -- To This -- "An isosceles triangle was the same on Earth or Mars." -- Oh -- Ong/Eugene/Monet -- 215 N. Fountain -- The Point at Which My Wife Enters a Poem about the National Geographic Cover Story (November 2009) "Are We Alone?" -- Wings -- The Song of Us against Vaster Patterns -- Go Too -- Doozie -- Away -- The Song of What We See -- Benny -- Midnight -- Selfish -- After the Broken Shoulder, -- My Personal Mythology -- The Story of My Life -- "What Would Darwin Say?" -- Dub -- Mapped -- Being Norman Dubie -- Two Brothers -- The Neutron Bomb -- "Try the selfish," -- Other Lives -- Encyclopedia Brittany -- Her One Good Dress -- 22 -- "If you saw even the first rocket take-off for Mars," -- Of the Generality -- Silences -- Etc.'s Wife -- Detective/Woody/Sci Fi -- World -- "The Pulses -- Lepidopteran -- Street Signs -- "Who carries a telephone book with them when they are running from a war?" -- Summary: Kinetic vs. Potential -- Left Behind -- As the World Turns -- A Gold Coin of Kumaragupta I (Minted AD 415-450) -- I Remember the Look of My Ex-Wife Sitting Quietly in the Window on a Certain Day -- We Focus on Love, When It's Death; We Focus on Death, When It's Love, Etc. -- The Clothes -- Paintings, Poems, Surveys, Songs, and Other Lyric Flights -- Busy -- Song -- Migration Song -- Song: Lore -- Tables -- Survey: The Lingering -- Survey: It's a Small World -- Survey: Unacknowledged Sex -- Survey: Frankenstein under the Front Porch Light -- Survey: An Explanation of the Mechanics of Her Marvelous Invention -- O'Neill -- 1,000 (Exactly) -- The Song of the Lark, Jules Adolphe Breton (1827-1906) --