In Googootz and Other Poems, Howard Faerstein meets the world with unabashed frankness and an intelligence both empathic and zapping. “Three generations from now / will the wren wheedle still? / Will wasps gorge on fallen fruit?” the poet wonders amid the ruinous violence (including that sprung from racism, classism, and homophobia) we inflict on others and ourselves. Carl Sagan’s suggestion that “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love” seems particularly relevant in times like ours when, as Faerstein insists, “misery like rapture ascends / as quickly as frost in mid-spring.” The poet’s heartache for the world’s raw wounds is as intense as his unflinching love for its shards of beauty. We might as well “wrap / gauze around the whole / bloody planet,” the poet grieves, while also urging us to celebrate the feverfew “growing out of the gutter,” the “sibilant warbling / of the dead,” the hatchlings of the macheted terciopelo “spreading out / in the early light / like stars / blinking forth / at dusk.” Like the luscious googootz, Faerstein’s voice nourishes and surprises. Savor it to the max and share.    

—Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Immigrant Model and Father Dirt

The poems in Howard Faerstein’s Googootz and Other Poems  journey by their own inimitable logic, finding their way as they go, because “you keep travelling on / whether life invites you or not.” In this wide-ranging volume of praise and protest, subtle humor and elegy, finches fly through fire, Hiroshima shadows a New England beach, space aliens reveal a secret connection to spaghetti and meatballs, a wasp and wind chimes conjure mystery “outside the borders of definition,” and seemingly respectable citizens harbor “cavernous hate camouflaged like terrorist conviction.” Even as Faerstein confronts the worst of our current moment, these poems “never refuse love’s lure,” never forget “the great glory” of creation. Googootz is a large-souled book that gives courage to “go on living.”

—Jay Udall, author of The Welcome Table and Because a Fire in Our Heads, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Prize