A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens by Howie Good
It’s something only I can hear / and especially during those moments / that get so quiet without you / not a buzzing exactly or a hiss / more like the screech of lab mice / conditioned by electric shocks / to shudder at the smell of cherry blossoms
Bit by bit and blade by blade, the sparrow builds its home. From branch to eave, streetlight to riverbank, almost any hollow is suitable for nesting. Passeridae in many areas find the dwellings of other birds ample housing, whether deserted or occupied. Though these intruders may be quick to infringe upon another's quarters, they are bold in defending their own.
Similar twigs of domesticity and salvaging weave throughout the grass and feathers of Howie Good's A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens. The final entry in a trilogy (or tetralogy, depending on how you look at it), the collection finds Good in somewhat serene territory as he ponders those quiet moments lost within the squall of our maddening times.
As always, he splits his musings between spare verse and profuse prose poems; so too does he continue his custom of embellishing the volume with appropriated texts, "dump[ing] them in a growing jumble at the end of the garden . . . misshapen pieces in a kind of extended jigsaw puzzle" depicting a life spent wondering why.
72 pages, handmade and numbered • 2016
It’s something only I can hear / and especially during those moments / that get so quiet without you / not a buzzing exactly or a hiss / more like the screech of lab mice / conditioned by electric shocks / to shudder at the smell of cherry blossoms
Bit by bit and blade by blade, the sparrow builds its home. From branch to eave, streetlight to riverbank, almost any hollow is suitable for nesting. Passeridae in many areas find the dwellings of other birds ample housing, whether deserted or occupied. Though these intruders may be quick to infringe upon another's quarters, they are bold in defending their own.
Similar twigs of domesticity and salvaging weave throughout the grass and feathers of Howie Good's A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens. The final entry in a trilogy (or tetralogy, depending on how you look at it), the collection finds Good in somewhat serene territory as he ponders those quiet moments lost within the squall of our maddening times.
As always, he splits his musings between spare verse and profuse prose poems; so too does he continue his custom of embellishing the volume with appropriated texts, "dump[ing] them in a growing jumble at the end of the garden . . . misshapen pieces in a kind of extended jigsaw puzzle" depicting a life spent wondering why.
72 pages, handmade and numbered • 2016
It’s something only I can hear / and especially during those moments / that get so quiet without you / not a buzzing exactly or a hiss / more like the screech of lab mice / conditioned by electric shocks / to shudder at the smell of cherry blossoms
Bit by bit and blade by blade, the sparrow builds its home. From branch to eave, streetlight to riverbank, almost any hollow is suitable for nesting. Passeridae in many areas find the dwellings of other birds ample housing, whether deserted or occupied. Though these intruders may be quick to infringe upon another's quarters, they are bold in defending their own.
Similar twigs of domesticity and salvaging weave throughout the grass and feathers of Howie Good's A Ghost Sings, a Door Opens. The final entry in a trilogy (or tetralogy, depending on how you look at it), the collection finds Good in somewhat serene territory as he ponders those quiet moments lost within the squall of our maddening times.
As always, he splits his musings between spare verse and profuse prose poems; so too does he continue his custom of embellishing the volume with appropriated texts, "dump[ing] them in a growing jumble at the end of the garden . . . misshapen pieces in a kind of extended jigsaw puzzle" depicting a life spent wondering why.
72 pages, handmade and numbered • 2016
Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY at New Paltz, is the author of more than a dozen poetry collections, including The Complete Absence of Twilight from MadHat Press and Fugitive Pieces from Right Hand Pointing Press. His poetry has been nominated multiple times for the Best of the Net and Pushcart awards and selected for The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and other anthologies. He co-edits White Knuckle Press with Dale Wisely and plays the ukulele with enthusiasm if not inborn ability.