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Paperback Trace of One Book

ISBN: 0877458065

ISBN13: 9780877458067

Trace of One (Iowa Poetry Prize)

In Trace of One, real geographies merge with spiritual ones, just as details of the speaker's physical and emotional worlds intertwine with the transcendent realms of science, religion, and myth. Joanna Goodman's poems share a sense of spatial and temporal displacement--they are love poems to a place, whether it be a field, a room, or a paradise--they celebrate their subjects, but they are also poems of grief and solitude. The poems resonate with ethereal echoes paradoxically emitted by an increasingly demystified world in which mechanical explanations for the workings of the human mind and body bump up against the mystery and obliqueness of the soul.

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Poetry

Customer Reviews

4 ratings

Tracing Lines of Connection

Joanna Goodman's debut collection is stunning in its virtuosity: in the complexity of its language, its use of metaphor, its ferverent desire to trace lines of connection. Poem after poem makes clear why the book won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Goodman, whose work has appeared in some of our nation's best journals, challenges her reader, demanding a nimbleness of mind, a willingness to take the poem on faith at first. If one continues to read, the sounds of the poems and their far ranging images and allusions reward in moments of estatic vision. As she says of a beech tree in March: "Pale gold, acrylic gold, / fledglings of wind-stream, slipstream, / late light's flexagon--where's the inroad?" It is the inroad Goodman seeks in poem after poem, and as we follow, she lets us see more clearly into the nature of things that only poetry can reveal. A splendidly conceived volume!

a very good book of poems

I enjoyed this immensely. Goodman is careful where she ought to be and, more importantly, bold when it counts. I thought this was a good debut and will definitely read her next.

brilliant, radiant

In a poem in this book, Joanna Goodman says that every word is a choice over another sound. These poems sound incredibly beautiful. & the thinking in them is always fascinating. The poetry in this fantastic first book is absolutely modern & very erudite, informed, wholly self-aware. I recommend it highly. & I look forward to more from this dazzling poet. She's very exacting in her writing. I think it will take a while.

a must read

Trace of One is searing, stunning, intensely meditative journey. Goodman mines the possibilities of language to penetrate our deepest emotional core. Think Hopkins brough into the 21st century--blending the lives of saints with the complexities of modern science, nature, philosophy, and the day to day difficulties of a secular life. Trace of One is not an easy read, but the rewards one reaps are more than worth the effort. These poems will stay with you long after you put it down.
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