Beckian Fritz Goldberg is the author of seven previous volumes of poetry, including Never Be theHorse, winner of the University of Akron Poetry Prize; Twentieth Century Children, winner of the Indiana Review Chapbook Prize; and Lie AwakeLake, winner of the Field Poetry Prize. Goldberg has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize from Poetry Northwest, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Prize, two Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowships, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including New American Poets of the ’90s, Best American Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Gulf Coast, Plume,and others. She currently lives in Oxnard, California, with her two cats.

Wisecracking, relentless, blindsided by loss—the speaker in this collection knows that if she’s to be redeemed at all it will be by how much she can conjure into her urgent songs: love poems to the world lost and the one present, even when it’s burning down around her. Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s tender, desperate poems, like Artaud’s actors, signal to us through the flames.