Everybody

Albert Goldbarth has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry twice and has been awarded the Mark Twain Prize for humor in poetry, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and other honors. He mixes complex ideas, wildly dissimilar objects and facts, detailed descriptions, striking lyricism, puns, coinages, and jargons. In his review in Slant, Eric McHenry wrote, "in spite of this omnivorousness, the poems aren't just big maximalist messes. Synthesis is Goldbarth's goal and his gift.

"Goldbarth's prodigious output is matched only by his erudition. He seems to have read and ingested centuries of history, biology, and religion. At home in a dozen different masks, he is witty, irreverent, and full of forgiveness for our human condition."--Maxine Kumin"Albert Goldbarth is a truly remarkable phenomenon. He straddles the ages, one foot on the big bang and the other on last Saturday, a quark, a Rembrandt, a wooly mammoth, and a zillion sweet details curatorially, passionately gathered and balanced on the tip of his astonishing tongue."--Donald Finkel