The Bad News First

Howie Good’s prose poems are essential reading. They are essential like the poems of Russell Edson, James Tate, and Bill Knott. That is to not to say that Good writes like anyone else. He is completely original and his lines jump from gutters to heaven and then keep ascending. His poems are vital and written from a near alternate universe governed by the sign of the rat. The Bad News First is his best book yet.

-Mike James, author of Leftover Distances

Howie Good plants the whimsical and the horrific side by side in dark and disturbing prose poems which are both surreal and hyperreal, often simultaneously. As dreadful as they can get, there always remains a sliver of hope beneath the skin of Mr. Good’s poems, just enough to keep us going and more than enough to keep us reading.

• M. J. Arcangelini, author of A Quiet Ghost and What the Night Keeps

Here are impossible things, all to be believed before breakfast. Howie Good writes in the language of REM fable and insomniac what-if, the tongue of old men who dream dreams and young men who see visions. The Bad News First, all insignificant words excised, finds Good reporting from a borderland claimed by absurdity, by atrocity, by the odd celebrity, deity and/or despot. We believe his tiny stories – each one blurring the triple frontier between prose poetry, nanofiction and journal entry – because we have lived our own such moments, in sleep and in sleeplessness.

-Steve Brisendine, The Words We Do Not have, Spartan 2021