Brent Goodman's "Wrong Horoscope"
I traded chapbooks with Brent Goodman, and what a good trade it turned out to be for me. I like many poems in Wrong Horoscope , my favorites being “The Walt Whitman Construction Project,” “Garage Sale Answering Machine,” and the title poem. Quite a number of the poems happen at a real or symbolic road junction. In the opening poem, “Commute,” the speaker approaches the city “through an interchange of horn blast and brake light.” After visiting deep America, with its prairie, thunderheads and birdsong, the speaker returns to Atlantic City “the way blood must return to the mind, in tides/ and intersections, this dull push into the smallest capillary.” If “smallest capillary” gives a sense of diminishment, the Walt Whitman suspension bridge provides the hope of connecting past experience and present home, of maintaining connections with the “living crowd.” In contrast with the exhilarations of travel, and the heightened moment at an intersection, the house, or home, is usually pictured as...