The Job of Being Everybody

Poetry. "Douglas Goetsch is, without a doubt, an unbridled creative talent. His pinpoint lyricism and apparent reverence for craft stamp his work with a gorgeous signature, and he just gets better with every outing. These are poems of desire and disappointment, the magnificent and the mundane—and in Goetsch's capable clutches, each one leaves an electric charge in the air. This is no misty-eyed look at where poetry has been or where it's going. THE JOB OF BEING EVERYBODY is where poetry should be, where it should have been all along."—Patricia Smith

"The gritty naturalism of these poems would qualify them as 'anti-lyrical' were it not for the mix of sweet nostalgia and bitter truth that gives them their pungent, winning flavor. It's hard to imagine a reader who could resist Goetsch's seductive opening lines."—Billy Collins

"Douglas Goetsch's autobiographical poetry is so consistently bleak, I'm not quite sure why I so often find it moving. I guess partly because the poetry seems so free from baloney, and because there is a sweetness down inside Goetsch's insistence on the factual."—Mark Halliday

Douglas Goetsch's books of poetry include NOBODY'S HELL (Hanging Loose Press, 1999), THE JOB OF BEING EVERYBODY (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2004), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Competition, Nameless Boy (forthcoming) and four chapbooks. He is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Donald Murray Prize, the Paumanok Prize, and numerous other honors. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Best American Poetry, online at Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac, on the air at NPR.