Little Fish

Lorrie Goldensohn's work should long ago have been better known and widely celebrated. Open to every kind of experience, her taste for language "luscious" and "apoplexing," and yet scouring and declarative. "I have finished knitting a perfectly brilliant sock," she declares in one poem, as if amused by the very notion of anything-poem or sock or sentiment-"perfectly brilliant" or indisputable. By the alternation of tenderness and a bristling dissatisfaction with lies or bullshit. Goldensohn moves with a confident embrace of sheer abundant presentness and what she calls "a fear of the death of joy." The long elegiac sequence on the death of her husband Barry Goldensohn that ends this book comes as a gut punch and a culmination.-Robert Boyers