FREDERICK FARRYL GOODWIN
2013. 978-1-881163-53-4
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Galactic Milk: the Five Questions of Mortality is the second collection of poems by American poet and former hardcore vocalist Frederick Farryl Goodwin, “whose debut begins with Ophelia, ends with Horace, and is populated in between with a cast ranging from Merlin to Robert Mitchum to the Buddha” (Boston Review). Here, characters are re-cast in a “strange mix of Grand Guignol and lyricism, a potent brew of fractured pastoral and seedy cityscapes, fragile confessionalism and Shakespearean film noir … The workings of some Spicerian angel … teetering on the brink of some ghastly void” (Signal to Noise Magazine). Once again, tradition fuses with machines of recombinatory energy to present a linguistically hybridized world of possibility for a high lyric of compression and genre-bending extension. Says John Latta, in his review of Virgil’s Cow: “Some astoundingly different register to the way of seeing.”
Reviews & Such
- Mass Poetry interviewed Goodwin in December 2014.
- Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle’s interview with Frederick Farryl Goodwin posted to the Montevidayo blog on March 27, 2014.
- Frederick Farryl Goodwin is the new star in American poetry and I’m his fan.—Tomaž Šalamun
- In the night I drink from Frederick Farryl Goodwin’s eternal Galactic Milk, joined by the whispering stars. The book has a healing effect like that of Achilles’ spear: it healed the mortal wounds that no other medicine could possibly heal. But, at the same time, so exciting and detoxifying and purifying from the mud and quicksand of everyday life! —Ferid Muhić
- This book is deep and wrenching—a searing journey.—Kathleen Spivak
- Goodwin as Basquiat. Poem as a canister throwing off uncontainable sparks. Goodwin is capable, too, of nearly unbearable restraint, a methodical discernment of shivery particulars… Belated death of a literalist. Read it.
—John Latta (on Virgil’s Cow)
About the Author
Frederick Farryl Goodwin was born in 1953 in Framingham, Massachusetts, and matriculated at Brown University at age 27, after an adolescence of blunt trauma. (He became mute at the age of 16, following the suicide of his mother, and spent three years hospitalized at McLean Hospital in Belmont.) Following a string of odd jobs, he became the vocalist for the hardcore band Black Hole, and then moved to the U.K., graduating with an M.A. from Clare College, Cambridge. He has worked in the U.S. and abroad as a theatre director, furniture salesman, debt collector, performance poet, farm hand, house painter, and lumber truck driver. He is the author of two collections of poetry published by Miami University Press: Virgil’s Cow (2009) and Galactic Milk: the Five Questions of Mortality (2013).
