Old Snow, White Sun

Exquisite and precise, Caroline Goodwin's newest poetry collection, Old Snow, White Sun, begins like "a catkin [making] its way through the cracks... A coolness over the throat." It traverses various terrains with grace and a commitment to astonishment. Here, Goodwin brilliantly gathers mothlight, herbal lore, psychedelia, heavy metal, and old charm to capture a world that is bountiful, magnificent, and impermanent. "Look now for a thin page / with very light ink, or a pelican feather / or, better yet, a creature long extinct hatching / from the mouth of the old mine." Ferocity and decaying bodies populate these poems, but also tenderness and rhythmic hope. Find in these poems a heron, a river, a hurricane, a floodgate, a levee, a story. "The one where the girl is strong enough. The one where she survives." Where she dwells and how she rises.

-Aileen Cassinetto, author of The Pink House of Purple Yam Preserves & Other Poems, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow

Caroline Goodwin's latest work invited me in to hear of intimate things, of how she's met with others, of lives and deaths, and being around humans, plants, and creatures in this world. It gave me glimpses of her experience: journeys, visions, moments of everyday life with friends, companions, grandmother, mother, loss, and all that difficult stuff, with Love at the heart of it, all the while incantating things and powers ("thoughts are things") in a way she has made her own.

These energies are born of an urgent, implicit questioning- not just about where we are these days with the great non-human planet, but given that dislocation and an overwhelming yearning for the old connection - how do we get on with it? Get on with one another? Nowadays, a Heron is at once a beautiful bird, an addictive drug, and a high-tech warplane: these poems say: okay then if you really want to listen, this is how that feels.

--Graham Hartill, author of Rhapsodies and Cennau's Bell