Good People - by Kevin Prufer (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Texas Poet Laureate Kevin Prufer's haunting new collection inhabits the uncertain spaces where history, imagination, and conscience refuse easy answers.

In Good People, Kevin Prufer explores the terrain where memory, history, and imagination collide. Across formally inventive poems--lyric sequences, fractured narratives, meditations, and darkly comic monologues--the past becomes unfixed. The dead return, scenes replay with disturbing clarity, and private anxiety becomes inseparable from public catastrophe.

Here, Prufer is fascinated by the minds and motivations of others, often imagined: impostors, angry lovers, drunken writers, a resentful old man, an aesthetic friend speaking from the afterlife--characters of uncertain moral compass who confront political and personal collapse alongside the uneasy comforts of contemporary American life. Again and again, ordinary scenes open onto existential terror, absurdity, and unexpected beauty.

These poems are distinguished by their tonal daring: wit gives way to tenderness; philosophical inquiry slips into performed confession; surreal invention coexists with the everyday. The result is a body of work at once intimate and expansive, haunted by questions of violence, ethics, inheritance, and the burden of memory--real or imagined.

At the heart of Good People lies a difficult question: What can poetry preserve against erasure? These poems resist easy consolation. Instead, they offer something stranger--an unflinching attention to the vagaries of consciousness, the ambiguities of human motivation, and the fragile, occasionally unhinged mind struggling to make meaning as history presses in.

Review Quotes

Praise for Kevin Prufer

"A gothic extravaganza featuring alligators, avalanches and medical devices left inside bodies, delivered largely in long, musical free verse lines. Poetry at full boil, poured with deliberate abandon."--David Orr, The New York Times Book Review

"Prufer's skillful use of traditional form; the presence of rhyme, meter, sonnets, and ars poeticae creates a complex and rich collection."--American Poet

"I don't believe the box of notes you admit carrying in your pocket can be described by you as a simple record of the times. In truth, the poems [of How He Loved Them] delineate a passion for the world in eloquent and profound ways, vividly understandable when conveyed to the reader."--Judge's comments, 2018 Julie Suk Award

"Intimacy, clarity of feeling, subtle music"--Mark Wunderlich, Poetry Society of America

"[Prufer's] work is deep, but never goes too far. He makes you think about the world, the country, and yourself in such an analytical way."--Britney Gulbrandsen

"Kevin Prufer has courage and compassion. And he places words so beautiful and accurate and terrifying along a line you can't help but read to the end..."--Marie Howe

About the Author

Kevin Prufer's newest books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024), a finalist for the Society of Midland Authors Award. His eight previous books include Churches, named one of The New York Times' ten Best Poetry Books of 2015, and How He Loved Them, which was longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award for the best poetry book from the American literary press.

Prufer's work has appeared widely in The Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, The Paris Review, and Poetry, among other publications. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lannan Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and other organizations.

He is the 2026 Texas Poet Laureate and Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he also directs the Unsung Masters Series, a publishing initiative devoted to rediscovering great, long-forgotten authors. His forthcoming books include Good People: Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2027) and the novel Summer of Shooting Stars (Slant Books, 2028).