About this item
Highlights
- While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent "afterward" of someone's death.
- About the Author: Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise.
- 100 Pages
- Poetry, Subjects & Themes
Description
About the Book
"While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent "afterward" of someone's death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion recurs: that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep--whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other words, this book is a kind of poetic biography, a journey of the self that ultimately pours everything that's happened in a life--all of the love and all of the loss--into the moment of death itself. The poems are meant to be celebratory and sublime in their comprehension of what happens to our memories when we die. And, if the reader is inclined--the reader becomes the vessel who holds all of this in their own imagination, carrying Turner and his memories forward into their own lives in a small way"--Book Synopsis
While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent "afterward" of someone's death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion recurs: that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep--whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other words, this book is a kind of poetic biography, a journey of the self that ultimately pours everything that's happened in a life--all of the love and all of the loss--into the moment of death itself. The poems are meant to be celebratory and sublime in their comprehension of what happens to our memories when we die. And, if the reader is inclined--the reader becomes the vessel who holds all of this in their own imagination, carrying Turner and his memories forward into their own lives in a small way.Review Quotes
"The lovely laments in Brian Turner's fourth collection, The Goodbye World Poem--the follow-up to The Wild Delight of Wild Things--dwell in the aftermath of loss and cultivate compensatory appreciation for the natural world. The death of his wife in 2016 is not the only bereavement in Turner's recent roster: 'Vigil' is about his father's last moments, and 'The Dead Guys' is an elegy for a close friend. 'Dying is so intimate, ' Turner writes in the opening poem. Even David Bowie's passing felt like a personal affront, as well as a reminder of mortality. ...The long title piece, which closes the collection, repeats many phrases from earlier poems--a pleasing way of drawing the book's themes together. The worst suffering is over, the tone suggests, and in 'this quiet place I'm learning is the rest of my life.' And his strategy is to 'fall in love with the small things.'"
--Rebecca Foster, Shelf Awareness Starred Review
"Many things are sinking here--a whale, a shadow, a brother, a love. Sometimes it is just how we are feeling, sometimes it is true. Turner offers us poems of a very specific form of heartbreak, 'all of it / gone now, submerged into something as simple / as the word after...' Yet this heartbreak pulls us in, moment by moment, 'moments / that gather into something / one might call a life.' By the end, it's an elegy for a person, but also for our lives. Beautiful."
--Nick Flynn
About the Author
Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise. His memoir My Life as a Foreign Country was published in 2014. He's the editor of The Kiss, and co-edited The Strangest of Theatres. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper's, and other fine journals. Turner was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and he's received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, an NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, a US-Japan Friendship Commission Fellowship, the Poets' Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He directs the MFA program in Lake Tahoe and lives in Orlando, Florida.