Mendeleev's Mandala Available for Pre-Order

My new book, Mendeleev's Mandala, is available for a special pre-order price of  $13.95 + S&H from Mayapple Press. There's one button for orders from the US, and another button for orders from Japan.


Here are what some generous poets have had to say about it:

This book is a library whittled down to a message in a bottle. Here is a poet who has boldly refused to abide to the expectations of genre—but instead, pushes language and form as a means of asking the most urgent questions. The result is a courageous and kaleidoscopic, at times tender and vulnerable, exploration of motherhood and family—set against the backdrops of science, history, religion, myths, and mathematics. When a poet embarks on a book as myriad and borderless as this one, we are gifted the rare chance to stand at the threshold of a formidable human storm. And from here, it is clear that Goodfellow’s Mendeleev’s Mandala is an electric book. But its lines are not limited to lightning. They move more like thunder, startling, resonant, and suddenly everywhere in the mind at once. – Ocean Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds

Jessica Goodfellow has a joyous intelligence and electric tongue. Reading this book a first time, my only regret was that I couldn’t read it a second first time. But then I read it a first second time and a first third. You see what I’m doing? I’m reading this book over and over, without ever completely taking it in. I think you will too. And like me, want only one thing from Jessica Goodfellow – more.  – Bob Hicok

From the origin of the number zero to immigration to map making, these poems leap dynamically between ideas and a blazing exploration of language. Folding and unfolding with searing brilliance, these poems reveal our human condition with a down-to-earth sense of humor and wonder. This must-read collection nourishes mind and body and opens up whole new ways of seeing the world around us. – Judy Halebsky, author of Tree Line

Twin

Palsy                                                                                       Bob Hicok

Ignoring the obvious is most of manners.
Better to turn from the man
with a nose shaped like the boot
of Italy, the bad dancing
of Siamese twins, to the lillies,
white & flecked red, and praise
their novel arrangement
in the green vase. Now that her hands
shake, music lives in her martini,
the bright collisions of ice and glass.
I didn't see this coming in the way
I didn't see the universe coming
or my loss of hair, the limp
that's set up shop in my left hip.
It's not rude but descriptive to say
her head bobs as those tigers
in the backs of cars do or
plastic dolls dressed in the uniform
of a favorite ball club that nod
their agreement in the rear view
all the way to Miami. An earthquake
lives in her signature on the bill
she snags at the bistro and insists
is hers, the pen moves
as the stylus in Ouija does,
giving a dark answer from a realm
without blood. When she lays
the tremor of her hand on my arm,
I'm reminded we all vibrate
more or less from womb to death.
Years back I'd have asked what
it's like, to be a stranger
in your body, but my greater pride
at forty's what I don't say. Anyway
truth encumbers. She might
contradict what I've decided,
might say all hopes and memories
are beaten about, that it's
like living in a tornado and not
proof of a soul so happy
to still be around it shivers.

*******************

Flemish                                Caroline Knox

My sister said,
“All the elements in this painting,
Still Life with Strawberries,
appear to levitate”
(by Isaak Soreau [1604–after
1638],
Flemish, early 1630’s
Gift of Mrs. Robert McKay
Cincinnati Art Museum)
DO NOT WRITE BELOW THIS LINE
__________________________________
it said on the postcard of the painting.

“I’ll tell you how to levitate
strawberries,” said my daughter.
“Hull a quart. Sprinkle them
with half a teaspoon of balsamic
vinegar and a teaspoon of
confectioner’s sugar; let them sit.”

Still Life with Strawberries, though,
isn’t a patch on his Carnations, Tulips, and Other Flowers in a Glass Vase with
       Peaches, Grapes, and Plums in a Basket on a Ledge with Cherries, a Butter–
       fly, and a Beetle.
Isaak Soreau was a twin, moreover,
and in 1652 his twin, Peter Soreau, painted Still Life of Apples, Black and
       White Grapes and a Walnut in a Porcelain Bowl, Together with Chestnuts,
       a Pear, Figs, Turnips, and a Melon, All on a Table with a Bunch of Snipes
       Hanging on a Nail
(SLABWGWPBTCPFTMATBSHN). Oh Flanders! A Benelux country, a

       Low Country. 

*******************************

Two Sisters Swim in a Small Locked Box 

By Malinda Markham
© 2005Portland Review Literary Journal

Sleepers dream of bandaged mouths and bright petals,
a static of bones and inelegant snow.

The night sparrow finally inhaled its own sound. What else
Could have happened? The vessel

was cardboard and twine. They should have strengthened
the moorings, should have cast

their own limbs of matter more promising
than flesh. One sleeper

mistakes a splinter for morning. The other curls
around a small jar of fear.

When the bough revoked its breaking,
the descent became nothing at all.

Two girls stood back to back, entwined.

The initial failure was a rocket-sound of wind.

****************************

Quilts                                                                              Jane Springer

Six siblings and two parents
divided by one man's wage
equals two rooms and three beds.
My father slept between his
brothers and his father's razor
strap. Some summers he slept
in his uncle's bathtub where
his eighteen-year-old aunt asked
where he would like to touch.
My mother slept in a field when
the boards of her house swelled;
there were no electric fans
on tobacco farms in Kentucky
then. Her sheets lilted over
her body with each June wind.
After they married, our parents
slept under quilts their own
mothers patched from discarded
clothes, and so their families never
left them alone: But here,
a brother's sleeve would reach
across their twin-breathed chests
as though to pass salt over a
crowded table. The dead never
do keep their hands to themselves—
and even stillborns'

empty hems cradled their toes.

********************************

Geography Lesson     Chris Abani

To the Igbo everyone is family, everything

is connected, Grandmother explained.

Like the weave of this raffia mat, we intertwine,

see? This is the world to the Igbo.

Nodding, the German anthropologist licked

her pencil in concentration and wrote:

To the Igbo, the world is flat like a mat.

Stranger

“we make strangers of ourselves by loving others”  Carol Moldaw (in a reading at Skylight Books)

*******************

Lazy Eye                                                         Lesley Wheeler

The stranger unplugs her bogus teeth
with a damp pop, tossing discarded parts
across my room, where she bunks this summer.
She brings Cadbury bars and Oxo cubes.

I am ten and not Cassandra. The gods
broke me, didn’t send a gift or a note—
Sorry, Second Sight is out of stock.
So one eye glares at tomorrow, the other watches

the visitor. Off with the belt that cinches her fine
figure. She tucks her dress, as green as envy,
into the pastel sweetness of my closet.
A bra’s silky cones protrude from her case.

I peel a scrap of plastic from one iris,
drop it in the shag, kneel to stroke
the rug, sit up to scrape the ball again:
could the lens still be drifting there? Have I lost

something, or not? Contacts improve me for other
lookers, but do not change what I see,
the double vision, partial views, the way
she’s my grandmother, the way she’s

a foreign country. Oh, hyphenated you,
the chorus mocks. I am a lucky girl, I have
souvenirs, I have plans, I can gaze along two
paths at once. Some kind of recompense. 

********************************************8

“The man who is detached in this way is the friend of God, as ‘a stranger is a friend of another stranger on account of their strangeness on earth’”. Martin Buber, The Legend of the Baal-Shem

*************************

The Possibilities for Wings                        Gary Fincke

How often have the customs of strangers
Silenced me into dreaming their beliefs.
In Java, for example, some people
Insist the souls of suicides return
In the bodies of crows, while in Scotland,
Souls of the lonely flee to butterflies.

In Pennsylvania? In this town where death
Belongs to those with names I've said, the souls
Of the ordinary are cries called out
And gone into an afternoon of rain,
Leaving me to wish winged things for the friend
Whose heart has failed, the friend who killed himself
In his meticulously sealed garage.

In my back yard? I'm talking to the friend
Who, like me, has sidestepped the terrible,
And even, from time to time, laughs aloud,
Neither of us, not yet, fluttering off
In moths or whatever we might predict
For our futures, the possible wings for
Depression, jealousy, the waste of hours.

Choose one? he asks, and I say the poorwill,
The only bird that hibernates, waking,
After months, to flight. Yes, he answers, good.
Overhead, just now, a small plane pierces
The air, and I imagine both of us
On board, becoming birds that seem to fly
Without love of anything but ourselves,
Shaping our fear against the summoned sky. 

****************************

Palsy                                                                                       Bob Hicok

Ignoring the obvious is most of manners.
Better to turn from the man
with a nose shaped like the boot
of Italy, the bad dancing
of Siamese twins, to the lillies,
white & flecked red, and praise
their novel arrangement
in the green vase. Now that her hands
shake, music lives in her martini,
the bright collisions of ice and glass.
I didn't see this coming in the way
I didn't see the universe coming
or my loss of hair, the limp
that's set up shop in my left hip.
It's not rude but descriptive to say
her head bobs as those tigers
in the backs of cars do or
plastic dolls dressed in the uniform
of a favorite ball club that nod
their agreement in the rear view
all the way to Miami. An earthquake
lives in her signature on the bill
she snags at the bistro and insists
is hers, the pen moves
as the stylus in Ouija does,
giving a dark answer from a realm
without blood. When she lays
the tremor of her hand on my arm,
I'm reminded we all vibrate
more or less from womb to death.
Years back I'd have asked what
it's like, to be a stranger
in your body, but my greater pride
at forty's what I don't say. Anyway
truth encumbers. She might
contradict what I've decided,
might say all hopes and memories
are beaten about, that it's
like living in a tornado and not
proof of a soul so happy
to still be around it shivers. 

***********************

From the Plane                         Anne Marie Macari

It is a soft thing, it has been sifted
from the sieve of space and seems
asleep there under the moths of light.

Cluster of dust and fire, from up here
you are a stranger and I am dropping
through the funnel of air to meet you. 

****************

Questions for Silence                                                  Paul Guest

In its first thin tide. In the place
to which it's come like a stranger.
Where the day is a map
you cannot read, crickets begin
in the warm night to whirr
green songs they could not unlearn
had they minds to grow bored.
The willow tree shudders
as though it were sewn up
with twitching nerves, with wire
bright as new-minted pennies. Where
do you go to gain the ear
of the moon, its ravaged face
lamented by no one? And
what do you tell something so old
it cannot remember
being once part of the world and not the sky?
What would your shadow care
to hear, to come close, to touch
hand to wall the tremor
of a passing train? If it had bones inside it,
you know it would flee.
So what are your words worth
to the hurried traffic,
to everything blurred,
to the ice cream truck
and its sweet patrol,
its song spilling out like a toy,
even in the dark? For all the sunlight
passing from the world
like a thought, who might you sing
to timid sleep? However long
you waited for rain
to rinse you of light's molten color,
for the elbow of the river
to bend back
to your life, the grass whispers,
you waited too long—
and all the while it speaks
it grows. 

Empty

Gone                                                      Malena Morling, from Five Points

          The world
is gone
      like the exact
shape of a cloud
          or the exact shape
of a hand waving
      in the sunlight
from across
          a crowded
train-station
      parking-lot
to another hand
          that waves back.

Come to think of it,
      everything up to now
is gone.
          And I have also
already left
      even though
I still ride
          the train
through the outskirts
      of the city.

And I still sit
          by the window,
the filthy
      train-window
while what is left
          of the demolished
buildings
      go past
and the empty
          billboards
and the transitory
      architecture.

It's amazing
          we're not
more amazed.
      The world
is here
          but then it's gone
like a wave
      traveling toward
other waves.

          Or like
the delicate white
      spaceships
of the Dogwood
          that float
as if there were
      no gravity,
as if there were
          no moments
isolated from
      any other
moments
          anywhere.


*****

Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.  St. Hilaire, fourth-century bishop (and patron saint against snake bites)

 

******

Empty similes                                                                  Bob Hicok

Like standing in front of a woman who says thank you
when you tell her you love her, that stuck

sound of a crow, pulling the one nail from its voice
outside your window and you

going down to the sea too late, where it was
three million years ago, waving your little towel
at the shadow of waves, like dropping

your stomach when you drop the phone,
a voice spinning at the end of the chord, your mother,
father, everyone

dead, even the person telling you
gone and you
waving your metronome arm, and time

inside the trees making clocks we check
by cutting them down.

 

******

Genesis                 Herman de Coninck, tr. By Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown

It was the sixth day. Adam was ready.
He saw the oaks firmly rooted
in the void. Power is a matter of branching.
He had seen the mountains, vast storerooms holding
only themselves, high empty cellars.
And deer. With legs as thin as stethoscopes
they stood listening to the breast of the earth,
and as soon as they heard something, they ran away,
inventing pizzicato as they fled the horizon.
And he had seen the sea, the busy swelling and receding
that makes one calm. And the empty, provocative gestures
of the wind, come along, come along, though no one followed.
And the depths, gulfs that make one uneasy. And being silent,
because that's what everything was doing, and being too big.
Then God said: and now you. No, said Adam.

 

******

Bats                                                                 Paisley Rekdal

unveil themselves in dark.
They hang, each a jagged,

silken sleeve, from moonlit rafters bright
as polished knives. They swim

the muddied air and keen
like supersonic babies, the sound

we imagine empty wombs might make
in women who can't fill them up.

A clasp, a scratch, a sigh.
They drink fruit dry.

And wheel, against feverish light flung hard
upon their faces,

in circles that nauseate.
Imagine one at breast or neck,

patterning a name in driblets of iodine
that spatter your skin in stars.

They flutter, shake like mystics.
They materialize. Revelatory

as a stranger's underthings found tossed
upon the marital bed, you tremble

even at the thought. Asleep,
you tear your fingers

through your damp neck hair
and search the sheets all night.

******

Future Tense                                                                                                                                                                                                              Charles Wright

All things in the end are bittersweet—
An empty gaze, a little way-station just beyond silence.

If you can’t delight in the everyday,
                                                         you have no future here.

And if you can, no future either.

And time, black dog, will sniff you out,
                                                            and lick your lean cheeks,
And lie down beside you—warm, real close—and will not move.  

 

Poems for the End

The New York Times Sunday Review blog has assembled six apocalyptic poems to celebrate the end of the Mayan calendar, or perhaps the end of the world. Including work by Laura Kasischke, Bob Hicok, and Dana Levin, it's a fun and yet sobering read. How often can you say that?