FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 18, 2009
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me is not just about loss, grief, a brother who succumbs to complications of leukemia at a young age. The poems within are also about addiction, sexual identity, enlightenment, jazz, Paris, and the Iraq War. A plate full of oysters, robots, and Moses also make cameo appearances. But swimming beneath all of these images and themes is the brother. The brother is of, beneath, and a part of each element of the collection.
Brent Goodman lives and writes outside of academia, monastically isolated in Wisconsin’s north woods. The Brother Swimming Beneath Me is not a book of riotous, clanging city poems. It is not even a book of whirring, ordered suburban poems. Rather, it is a book of deep introspection. It is not about living in the forest; instead, it is a book born of the physical and mental space that can be found there. Poems in The Brother Swimming Beneath Me range from formal sonnets to relaxed journal entries, sparse lyrics to nonce-form prose poems.
Brent Goodman earned an MFA from Purdue University in 1996, and published two chapbooks in 1999. He took a hiatus from writing poetry between 2002 and 2006. The Brother Swimming Beneath Me is his first full-length collection.
The Brother Swimming Beneath Me can be ordered online via blacklawrencepress.com. More information about Brent Goodman and his work at brent-goodman.blogspot.com. Hear Goodman read from his book in these two beautifully produced YouTube videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZuguoqexJ4, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrmnX2UPQ8Y
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Please contact Diane Goettel at [email protected] for media inquiries and review copies. Brent Goodman is available for both speaking engagements and interviews.