The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems: 1972-2007 Book

"Albert Goldbarth is . . . a contemporary genius with the language itself . . . There is simply no contemporary poet like him." —David Baker, The Kenyon Review

Now his, the only

overhead turned on. Now nothing else existed:

only him, and the book, and the light thrown over his shoulders as luxuriously as a cashmere shawl.

—from "Shawl"

Albert Goldbarth has created an unmistakable signature style—learned, copious, hilarious, and heartbreaking—which has so far spanned an award-winning career of thirty-five years. The Kitchen Sink brings together forty new poems with a rich selection of earlier poetry, ranging from the brief, flickering lyric to the long, narrative sequence. In both forms, Goldbarth exerts a wild showmanship and an ever-widening scope to illustrate the complex character and interconnectedness of humanity, history, and art. The Kitchen Sink is the definitive book by one of America's most original and entertaining poets.

Publishers Weekly

Few books of poems have sported more apt titles: in 29 earlier books, the almost implausibly prolific Goldbarth (Budget Travel Through Space and Time) has mentioned almost every poetic topic, many that no poet before him has tried. Sometimes encyclopedic, sometimes chatty, given always to digressions, Goldbarth has written his long-lined free verse about ancient Near Eastern crockery, collectible figurines from the '40s, Jewish mysticism, "the cookbook used by Madame Curie," "a spirit from the quantum (and therefore invisible) universe," cancer, bereavement, sex, lust, underwear, "native gourds" and "meteor rubble," Keats, coin collecting and "the first of the many McDonald's Happy Meal toys/ that Jeremy received with his McNuggets." Goldbarth's breathless trivia is an end in itself, but it also becomes a means to simpler obsessions, shared with older sorts of lyric poetry. Why do we fall in love, and how can we stay in love? What do children owe their parents, and what, if anything, does America mean? Goldbarth (who has won two National Book Critics Circle awards) badly needed a new selected (his last one came in 1983); this long collection is just right for this poet of excess and enthusiasm, always hoping to show, and often showing, how "the world// not only works but networks." (Mar.)