Mr Universe

Poetry. California Interest. Rich Goodson’s debut pamphlet wryly interrogates the male body–and finds it to be a place of risk and narcissism, shame and sensual epiphany. It begins with Vladimir Putin urinating and ends with an Australian mechanic’s avowal of love. In between are Viking swords, terrorism, cosmetic surgery, Daniel Craig–and God disguised as a wasp. The voice is mischievous, restless and visceral. Its sensuousness belies the urgent nature of the interrogation: to ask what–if anything–the male body means.

Goodson’s poems will demand your attention. His is a worldview opened up by a questing and questioning sense of his own and others’ masculinity, utterly physical in its efforts to look beyond materiality. This is not an incoherent manliness, struck dumb by its own swagger–on the contrary, in variety of form and tone, Goodson’s poems are judicious to the point of delicacy. They’re as taut as a dancer’s calf.–Gregory Woods