Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems

Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems gathers the work of Beckian Fritz Goldberg, one of her generation’s premiere voices and its fiercest proponent of a free imagination. From the beginning of her career and in all of her six acclaimed volumes, Goldberg’s poetry has rendered labels — narrative, meditative, lyric, experimental — irrelevant. It is quickened instead by the body as it experiences itself in an open environment: un-codified, stranded by longing and love and grief, defiantly caring in the midst of our violent cultural moment, at once creaturely and divine, precisely sensory, and somehow pluralized by every harrowing turn. With artfully conversational intensity her new poems extend her vision of an earthly cosmos that resurrects itself daily.

“In the new poems, Goldberg has not only perfected the art of the intensely and relentlessly perfect conclusion, she has elevated to perfection the art of looking back with unadulterated clarity.”
—Sima Rabinowitz, NewPages.com

Praise for Beckian Fritz Goldberg:

“These are wild poems but so perfectly controlled, cadenced, they make you feel at home in the world they build. And it’s an edgy world, sometimes frightening, a world to make you laugh and weep. Each time I read this book I find new turns: of splendid imaginative abilities, tasty diction, and beautiful noises. Read these poems aloud! Read them to your friends and neighbors, your children, strangers, your students, your teachers. Read them.”
—Thomas Lux

“. . . if Goldberg’s brilliantly anthropomorphized and frightening badlands of desire are the tragic life of our suburbs, then here’s a version of our extinction you’d better accept as published by fire on the pages of lament.”
—Norman Dubie

“Lie Awake Lake is made out of brilliance of thought, of heart and of language we find only in the truest poetry . . . it is as relentless and unmediated as if it was letters or diaries but it is song—come to give us human animals pleasure and to help us endure.”
—Jean Valentine

Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Beckian Fritz Goldberg holds an M.F.A. from Vermont College and is the author of six volumes of poetry. Her work has appeared widely in anthologies and journals including, The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry l995, Field, The Gettysburg Review, Harper’s, The Iowa Review, New American Poets of the 90’s and The Massachusetts Review. She has been awardedthe Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Award, The University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, the Field Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize. Goldberg is currently Professor of English at Arizona State University.

Reliquary Fever: New and Selected Poems by Beckian Fritz Goldberg