Kevin Goodan – författare

From the unique perspective of a U.S. Forest Service elite, a Type 1 Interagency “Hotshot” Crew (the “SEAL Team Six of the firefighting world”), poems weave together memory, urgency, and the passage of time. Features segments from actual incident reports, forcing readers to witness what it’s like to stand before an inferno, walking with one foot in the black.

Anaphora is a gut-wrenching elegy with psychological intensity, giving way to the dizzying grief of loss. Goodan creates a heightened, frantic and piercing dialogue that grapples with mental illness, stigmas, relationships, and morality in the landscape of rural America.

Following the news of a long-past lover’s death, In The Days That Followed grapples with the sudden knowledge of the existence of a stillborn child conceived out of wedlock and never named, and never spoken of after the relationship had ended. How do you miss someone who you never even knew? It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into the landscape, and give them a fleeting figure. By giving them a voice and a shadow, a gesture of acknowledgment, we can give a sweet farewell from the earth, from our past, and from their future they were never granted.

Let the Voices is a book about the uneasiness of living with those whose lives have been cut short by the violence of poverty. Set in a trailer park on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana, the speaker in these poems gives voice to childhood companions often hungry, both literally and figuratively, for a kind of salvation. In a splicing of lyric and narrative vignettes language becomes both subject and catalyst for recovering one's voice in a negligent world.