The Needle

Poetry. [Good] has a sense of pentameter and a sense of image and a sense of ‘experiment’ that almost never go together.–Stephanie Burt The poems in Regan Good’s THE NEEDLE find their home deep in the Northeast Corridor’s scum, rot, and decay–the source, ultimately, of regeneration. Born into a world where ‘it was ever Easter in our yard, ’ the poet avers ‘I was ever thinking backwards toward the other way.’ Poem by poem, THE NEEDLE charts the directions of that other way, where ‘One writes towards the worm, the white welter, / the purity of the hole.’ Good is Cailleach returned, for all, just when we’d thought we’d lost her forever.–Claudia Keelan

THE NEEDLE takes aspects of what gets called ‘naturalism’ and pieces together portions of the world, or rather, worlds, and holds them together with a glue of vital, unlikely association. Good’s voice deserves our attention, unless we’ve stopped looking for the worthwhile.–Carl Martin

The poems of THE NEEDLE are textured, muscular, and driven by the idea that the natural world is the last parcel of moral ground we have. Endlessly surprising and deliberate, they show us how what we’ve lost may yet be recovered.–Sean Singer

THE NEEDLE comes barreling out of time in an utterly original and necessary way. The poems inhabit a landscape that is recognizably our own but at the same time ancient, burning with celestial fire and hunger. Intoxicating and grounded in the stuff of the earth, with echoes of Stevens and Yeats, THE NEEDLE is extraordinary.–Tom Thomson