Honey and Junk: Poems

by Dana Goodyear

Overview

A wry and dark debut of sharply compressed lyrics by a precocious new voice in poetry.

These powerful poems are like wrecked pastorals whose narrator seeks temporary pleasure in wit, form, rhyme, or the borrowed weekend house. Inching toward consolation in the face of sudden loss, the poet examines the reconfigured world. The elegies are like conversations overheard or recounted dreams: full of portent and mystery.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393292992
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	12/09/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	193 KB

About the Author

Dana Goodyear’s poetry has appeared in several journals, including the Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

What People are Saying About This

J. D. McClatchy

Haunted, ruthless, tender—scary-cool and edgy-smart. . . . The most breathtaking debut in years!

Editorial Reviews

Since winning the undergraduate's Hopwood Prize at Yale in the late '90s, Goodyear has been pretty much unstoppable, landing first at PW, and then, quickly, at the New Yorker, where she is now a staff writer, and where several of the poems from this debut collection first appeared. They have a stark set of emotional registers that blend lingering anger over parental neglect and divorce ("Mother was never in the same room with any of us./ I think she was a hostess, in which case I should say,/ Thank you for having me") with patrician codes, and the cool accusations, failures, actings out and excitements of current loves. They often read as if a Susan Minot character were channeling Dorothy Parker: "Give the hypothermic girl/ a stiff hot drink./ The mouth of a stranger is a pocket of breathable air./ Its spit is a warm vital flow." All the poems are short and well-calibrated. Some have Dickinson-like formal rhymes that come off as motivated, if not always satisfying ("And human love and unison are null/ when even solitude is terminal"); some are littered with offhand allusions to class trappings that fail to sustain ("Cross-breeze. Swiss dot. View"). Goodyear is at her best when her speaker is at her meanest, which isn't quite often enough, but taken as a whole, her poems perfectly reproduce the claustrophobic atmosphere of love among the ruins of plenty. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This is an impressive debut from a self-possessed, mature poet. Goodyear, who is an editor and regular contributor at The New Yorker, writes bold, colorful poems that are at once sharp and moving, and always bitingly ironic. Her poems court despair but ultimately refuse to give into it, and as a result, the voice behind them comes across as both cynical and vulnerable. Take, for example, the opening lines of the poem "Things get better before they get worse": "I find you drinking bourbon / with a teenager— / let's not leave her out of this, / or the fact that you don't drink." The speaker here is an adult—proud and bitterly aware of the obligations that go with living up to such a role—"They ask after you at the garage; / I tell them little lies." Goodyear seems to have mastered the art of saying a lot in a little space—her poems are generally short—and her style is often elliptical and surreal. In the poem "County Line Road," for instance, the speaker's father is described as "a bandage, a mustache, / from time to time a saddening salt-and-pepper beard," and the mother as a "monger" with a "pink fish" and "dill hairs clinging to her hands." There is a definite preoccupation with morbidity and physiology apparent throughout the collection, and we encounter death both dreamed and real, striking images of darkness: "a blackening room," a "bloodred shirt," and "dark upholstery and flowers," as well as snapshots of blood hanging off an arm "like frozen blooms," a "cussed heart," a "pulsing brain," and someone "bleeding uncontrollably." Yet these images are counterbalanced by the light stuff of everyday life: a tennis match, a shop for gentlemen's clothes,and the usual landscape of the Cape: "A slurry beach. / An empty breach. / Thick, eggish water breaking / on the boring, boring shore." What we have here is a poet with sophisticated spunk and undeniable talent—a significant voice in contemporary American poetry.

KLIATT - Beth Lizardo

Slender but hardly slight, Goodyear's first collection marks the arrival of a highly imaginative and striking voice. Whether she comes off to the reader as candid or merely overconfident, the poet absorbs the world around her with a certain audacity: "If it all seemed endless/ viewed in the three-way mirror/ then I remember the opposite endlessness/ when you were still much clearer." Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Despite Goodyear’s gift for wordplay, she is at base not a poet of revenge but one of loss and love—of sentiment frozen by insight. . . . Honey and Junk packs a terrific punch.”

New York Times

Haunted, ruthless, tender—scary-cool and edgy-smart. . . . The most breathtaking debut in years!

J. D. McClatchy

With talent this apparent, the heart will always have room for more from [Goodyear].

St. Louis Today