Works by
Beckian Fritz Goldberg
(Poet)

Books

• Egypt from Space (Future release)

• The Book of Accident (2006)
  In her latest collection of poems, The Book of Accident, Beckian Fritz Goldberg invites the reader into a shadowy atmosphere where her language prowls among strange images--hummingbirds become a "fistful of violet amphetamines" and desire gnaws away like a "live rat sewed up inside of us." Reading The Book of Accident is like entering a graphic novel with missing panels, a noir world of queasy glints and feral adolescents, "a world where no one has to love you." Characters go by odd names--Torture Boy, Skin Girl, Lala Petite, Wolf Boy (his body "pale as the plucked end of light")--punk kids fending for themselves in the expressionistic version of those old stories "that began, Let's take the children out to the woods/ and leave them." And on every page, there's Goldberg's hard-edged wit, with the speed and flash of a video game. These poems show mercy but give no ground. They make you feel heartbroken and frightened and exhilarated at the same time.

• Lie Awake Lake (2005) -- Winner 2004 Field Poetry Prize
  Centered often around the event of her father's death, and exploring the meanings of the body in new and often surprising ways, these poems extend the range and accomplishment of a poet who is greatly admired by her fellow writers.

• Never Be the Horse (1999)
  Never Be the Horse depicts the world of a postmodern Dark Dorothy whose attempts to return home are foiled when she falls into the Garden of Eden, into the underworld with Walt Whitman, into mysterious versions of her own childhood. The poems evoke this nighttime within the self haunted by mythic and shadow-paradises--of home, homeland, the original garden--where "every story is made to hide / the others." Here, Adam slips on a piece of Eve's clothing, a child falls in love with the bomb, and a mourner watching the whores chased from the cemetery laments. It is also a world of erotic disguises. Still, it remains recognizably this world. The parent lies to the child about death, and the child lies to the parent about death. In the journey between those lies, as in the journey taken by the horse of the title, language becomes the place of refuge. It is there that "one world is always beginning." From "willingness . . . speaking its motherese," to the devil's "gossamer gibber," the voices in these poems discover that to be human is, as Heidegger said, "to be a conversation."

• Summer Heats Like the Needle in Its Chosen Skin (1999)

• Twentieth Century Children (1999)
  Limited edition chapbook.

• In the Badlands of Desire (1993)

• Body Betrayer (1991)