Advance Praise for Crybaby Bridge
“Crybaby Bridge is one of a kind, but there are plenty of us who can (and should) make use of its words: “It’s the end times and all our bills are due.” As all that’s ephemeral threatens to congeal into wrong life—“beauty founded on wrecks, rags becoming a delicacy,” as Brecht says—here are speakers who withstand and push back, who reconfigure the real so that we might see our way to maintaining the good in it.”
—Graham Foust
“Ghosts and syntax. These two elements help form the rhetorical spine of Kathy Goodkin’s astonishing debut book as she explores what it means to be haunted. Referencing the legend that certain bridges are inhabited by ghosts of crying children, Crybaby Bridge is a mythic journey through humidity-drenched, insect-whirring terrains where issues of grief, stasis, desire, and textuality are probed, especially in her extraordinary sequence “Sleep Paralysis.” Restless and revelatory, Goodkin’s poems unfurl much like a filmstrip as her cinematic eye moves us from one striking image to the next: from “a red horse marring the field” to floodlights roaming “across the fields like lithe animals.” By turns feral and ethereal, Crybaby Bridge will vibrate its way through your body like summer thunder.”
—Simone Muench
“In these poems, sleep is a paralysis; the waking life is a haunted evanescence. Kathy Goodkin—a fabulist of small towns, outskirts, and backwaters—navigates and explicates, in her spare and essential lyrics, the inexhaustible complexity of what we consider the ordinary. I love the uncanny, trenchant logic of her irreducible poems—their idiosyncratic sensibility, their clairvoyance, and the chilling dis-ease of their divination and their déjà vu.”
—Eric Pankey