The Louisiana Purchase

Poetry. The linked poems in THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE carry the reader past Ozzie Smith and Thomas Jefferson into a world where the moon is an outlaw, a weeping elephant flees from the authorities, the Pinkertons upset the sky, effigies of Phil Niekro are burned, and a society made of words collapses. According to Scott Glassman of Rain Taxi, Goar’s clause-free declarative sentences are a perfect match for the edgy grade-school surrealism that guides us into emotional revelation. THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE is what Alice would have found had she fallen into William Clark’s map instead of a rabbit hole; it is an uncanny territory that both delights and disturbs.

With America behaving as it does today, we all need to better understand the American beauty of years past and the American beauty that is yet to come. Jim Goar’s THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE reinvents a landscape so similar and dissimilar to what we know of a country’s terrain that it is obviously a beauty that is yet to be. Or more so, Goar reinvents a country that has no limits because it exists in the alternate space of the supernatural. So that a ‘President’s signature is printed on the face of the moon’ in order to create a world where ‘Kansas starts to bleed’ so that ‘the sun is taken from the sky’ and likewise, to make a space where a human-modified moon can exist with us in a plain way, do our bidding, and also fight back. You should read this book. It’s not the American story you learned about in third grade. It’s the one you wanted to learn. It’s the one that was always the true story.–Dorothea Lasky