Albert Goldbarth

A collection of poems by the two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award takes readers on a tour of the universe, from the sinking of the island nation of Tuvalu into the Pacific to the construction of the William Herschel telescope from horse manure in the 1770s.

A collection of poems ranges from serious and personal topics to odd historical facts.

"Dark Waves and Light Matter is an energetic, eclectic gathering of Albert Goldbarth's recent essays. They are part meditations and part short stories, part scholarship and part downright sassiness. A paean to 1950s comic book villains leads, through a visit with Charles Dickens, to a contemplation on the unity of the first day of Creation. Agatha Christie, Timothy Leary, and Pieter Brueghel all contribute equally to a consideration of how the unity of our lives is perforated by tiny moments of disjunction. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wizard of Oz, and the National Enquirer unlock a study of patricide and UFOlogy."--BOOK JACKET.

Troubled Lovers in History demonstrates an exhilarating range: from the briefest of lyrics to rich and multipartite narrative adventures in exotic realms; from a comic ditsy monologue spoken in immigrant "Yinglish" to a soulful elegy set in San Antonio's Pearl Beer brewery plant; from Martian invaders, through polar explorers, to all of us busy inflicting "words with edges" on those we love. Goldbarth sets his unflinching study of individual hope and grief against the backdrop of history: the travels of Marco Polo; Bertha and Wilhelm Rontgen's discovery of X-rays; an 1800 battle "twixt Dragon Sam, the great Exhaler of Gouts of Amazing Flame ... and Liquid Dan, the Living Geyser."

The pieces here range from a quiet six-line lyric to rollicking mini-epics; they go from homages to the classic sonnet sequence to poems in the form of prose essays or one-act drama. Their subject matter grandly mixes hieroglyphics with newspaper comic strips, science fiction space explorers with Ellis Island immigrants, the sacred inner sanctums of the pyramids with McDonald's golden arches on a day when Wordsworth visits, biblical scholarship with barroom yuks, and the tiny daily triumphs and losses of all of our lives with the exploits of the gods and the limitless pulsing of the universe. In this new book, with the overriding memory of a mother's death by cancer, Goldbarth produces a sequence unified by themes of elegy, mourning, and lamentation, with settings that move from ancient pharaonic burial chambers to one last day at a suburban Chicago nursing home. It is a book of family history, and of intimate moments saved from disappearing into the swirl of time.

Albert Goldbarth's "essays" (for want of a better term) stitch together elements of the memoir, the short story, the stand-up comedy shtick, the scholarly thesis, and the richly textured prose poem, into what critic Robert Atwan calls "a whole new breed" of personal essay. Goldbarth, says Atwan, "has spliced together strands of the old genre with a powerful new gene - and the results are miraculous.". Great Topics of the World investigates everyday traumas and triumphs - the despairs, delights, and complexities of our lives - and places them in an historic, cosmologic context, in which Vermeer, Leeuwenhock, Amy Lowell, astronauts Kepler and Tycho Brahe, Krazy Kat creator George Herriman, and the Golem-conjuring Rabbi of Prague reenact their legendary dramas. And recurring throughout is the more intimate leitmotif of Goldbarth's own life and that of his family: the parents who inadvertently fed their boy's fascination with the flotsam and jetsam of American pop culture; the grandparents whose emigration from the old country was like "landing on Mars"; and the author himself, standing midway between the lore of Middle Europe and the lure of the New World, with its adventure comics, golden-haired enchantresses, and promises of a star-kissed future. At its core, Great Topics of the world is about one of the great topics of our century: the cultural and personal collisions brought about by a world in migration.

In his new book of poetry, Albert Goldbarth dons his rocket blast-pack and explores the intriguing idea that the joys, despairs, and confused hesitancies of our most intimate relationships can be rendered through some of science fiction's most cherished motifs: that man and woman are mutually reconnoitered alien landscapes; that sleep is eight hours of time travel; that the city-smashing monster sometimes runs amok in each of us; and that the mind is as deep as the universe, filled with glories and griefs on the scale of planets.

A collection of essays about the mysteries of dualities and the multiverse that exists in everyone.