Laura Goldstein
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awesome camera (2014)
by Laura Goldstein
What an awesome camera Laura Goldstein wields! This one captures “not errors but eros” and deploys “a language longing on its own.” Walking through the front lines of the anthropocene wars, Goldstein presents micro-scenarios with macro-significance: we get a glimpse of “a night watchman [who] fits his feelings into a contract,” as if that’s the only way we have left to process feelings. Existence reduced to an economic algorithm—"on one hand a problem another a salary”—surely there’s more to us than that! Isn’t there? Isn’t there? Goldstein’s camera may show us darkness, but we never forget that both poems and cameras need light to operate. — Jay Besemer (author of Telephone)
loaded arc (2013)
What can the lyric postmodern do in the face of large-scale violence and micro aggressions? Laura Goldstein knows. loaded arc, in pages of intense music, pulls us sonically down deep into truths that are knowable because of beauty. This poetry enacts relationships: hurricane Katrina and inequality, fluctuating bank balances and television, attempts at accounting for everything “because the world/is for falling in love with…” and anxious conceptualizations of fatherhood/homeland. In sure sculpted lines, calling up multiple voices and a wide array of sources, and always maximizing The Word’s out-loud potentials—because utterances can be simultaneously sacred and secular—this book is buoyant, is hope, “is clearly room for action and alternatives can be planned…" — Jill Magi
