The Job of Being Everybody
"Douglas Goetsch is, without a doubt, an unbridled creative talent. His pinpoint lyricism and apparent reverence for craft stamp his work with a gorgeous signature, and he just gets better with every outing. These are poems of desire and disappointment, the magnificent and the mundane -- and in Goetsch's capable clutches, each one leaves an electric charge in the air. This is no misty-eyed look at where poetry has been or where it's going.The Job of Being Everybodyis where poetry should be, where it should have been all along." --Patricia Smith"The gritty naturalism of these poems would qualify them as 'anti-lyrical' were it not for the mix of sweet nostalgia and bitter truth that gives them their pungent, winning flavor. It's hard to imagine a reader who could resist Goetsch's seductive opening lines." --Billy Collins"Douglas Goetsch's autobiographical poetry is so consistently bleak, I'm not quite sure why I so often find it moving. I guess partly because the poetry seems so free from baloney, and because there is a sweetness down inside Goetsch's insistence on the factual." --Mark Halliday