John Godfrey’s masterful body of work has sustained its attentive, lovesick, unruly energy for over fifty years. The City Keeps brings together the best poems from his thirteen collections, plus some previously uncollected. Dedicated to those who people the City of New York, Godfrey’s work is populated, elusive, and geometric, but also full of tenderness and light.

With an enemy like daylight who needs the psychology dime Hips do the work and I cross the world

John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013). He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.