Googootz and Other Poems

THE BOOK: Googootz and Other Poems

PUBLISHED IN: 2018.

THE AUTHOR: Howard Faerstein.

THE EDITOR: A Silver Concho Poetry Selection, edited by Pamela Uschuk & William Pitt Root.

THE PUBLISHER: Press 53, Winston-Salem, N. Carolina, Press 53.com.

SUMMARY: Googootz and Other Poems continues my exploration and embrace of “the vastness of my true identity.” This second collection of my work charts an expanding sensibility and the way I’ve found to be and to survive our exquisitely terrifying, beautiful (and absurd) world. The language is grounded in the concrete and informed by the spirit of dream, doo wop and bebop. Rather than a narrative arc, this manuscript follows my desires, my hopes, my recollections and reflections of over seventy years of witness and experience.

THE BACK STORY: No back story except to say I’m a poet.\

WHY THIS TITLE: The squash flower, a delicacy in some parts of our world, is called googootz in Italian. You’ll have to read the poem to see why it’s also the book’s title.

WHY SOMEONE WOULD WANT TO READ IT? If you’re at all interested in contemporary poetry then here’s a collection of poems to read.

REVIEW COMMENTS: In Googootz and Other Poems Howard Faerstein meets the world with unabashed frankness and an intelligence both empathic and zapping. “Three generations from now/will the wren wheedle still?/ Will wasps gorge on fallen fruit?” the poet wonders amid the ruinous violence (including that sprung from racism, classism, and homophobia) we inflict on others and ourselves. Carl Sagan’s suggestion that “for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love” seems particularly relevant in times like ours when, as Faerstein insists, “misery like rapture ascends/as quickly as frost in mid-spring.” The poet’s heartache for the world’s raw wounds is as intense as his unflinching love for its shards of beauty.  We might as well “wrap/gauze around the whole/bloody planet,” the poet grieves, while also urging us to celebrate the feverfew “growing out of the gutter,” the “sibilant warbling/of the dead,” the hatchlings of the macheted terciopelo “spreading out/ in the early light/ like stars/ blinking forth/ at dusk.” Like the luscious googootz, Faerstein’s voice nourishes and surprises. Savor it to the max and share. “– Mihaela Moscaliuc, author of Immigrant Model and Father Dirt.

“The poems in Howard Faerstein’s Googootz journey by their own inimitable logic, finding their way as they go, because “you keep travelling on/ whether life invites you or not.” In this wide-ranging volume of praise and protest, subtle humor and elegy, finches fly through fire, Hiroshima shadows a New England beach, space aliens reveal a secret connection to spaghetti and meatballs, a wasp and wind chimes conjure mystery “outside the borders of definition,” and seemingly respectable citizens harbor “cavernous hate camouflaged like terrorist conviction.” Even as Faerstein confronts the worst of our current moment, these poems “never refuse love’s lure,” never forget “the great glory” of creation. Googootz is a large-souled book that gives courage to “go on living.” — Jay Udall, author of The Welcome Table and Because a Fire in Our Heads, winner of the X. J. Kennedy Prize.

AUTHOR PROFILE: Howard Faerstein is the author of two chapbooks: Play a Song on the Drums, he said and Out of Order (Main Street Rag) and two full-length collections: Dreaming of the Rain in Brooklyn and Googootz and Other Poems, both published by Press 53. Recent poetry and reviews (five time Pushcart nominated poet) can be found in Great River Review, Nimrod (finalist for the Lorca Prize), CutThroat (Discovery Poet), Off the Coast, Rattle, upstreet, Mudfish and on-line in Verse Daily, About Place, Nixes Mate,On the Seawall, Poetrybay, Peacock Journal, and Connotation. He presently volunteers as a citizenship mentor at the Center for New Americans, is co-poetry editor of CutThroat, A Journal of the Arts, and lives in Florence, MA. 

AUTHOR COMMENTS: A new chapbook, Out of Order, will be published in 2020 by Main Street Press.

Out of Order / Howard Faerstein

SAMPLE POEM: http://www.connotationpress.com/poetry/2807-howie-faerstein-poetry.

YOU ASK HOW I  DESCRIBE YOU TO MY FRIENDS

I tell of a man jailed for the fifth time

because of his fear of liberty

and I say because of my fear of life without you, I could be arrested too

but that’s about me and so I say it’s also true

 

that I can’t describe you because I’ve used up

my allotment of consonants  and vowels except for double u’s

and since we’ve met it’s been a whirlwind

and I’m windblown and wayward.

 

Sometimes I tell them that you reflect the shine

juncos drop on shadows of falling snow or I say

that waking up, speechless Harpo is in my bed,

blonde hair like on the curly kale uncovered in March thaw.

 

Then I tell them you’re like pigeons on a peaked roof

or wasps in winter or gulls blown inland,

maneuvering between our laughs, their cries,

circling ghost-like over St. Mary’s cemetery,

 

a matted ocean of grassy graves

where violet blends into orange.

I never say you’re my main squeeze, gf, lover, old lady.I

say you’re more like a mackerel than a flounder

 

 since you’ve got those pretty eyes on both sides of your burnished face.

I’ve even admitted to feeling like the Subaru when it kicked

 into gear on its own, taking every zigzag of the driveway

until smashing backward into an oak.

 

That’s how much the wagon craved love—broken glass, crunched trunk, the mud

—and so I add you remind me of the old men gathered in storefront shuls,

reciting the blessing for the new moon of Tishreiand

how Coltrane played a different solo each night at the Vanguard

 

when the quartet laid down My Favorite Things.

And one final thing, I confess

you make me think of Daddy Wags, Cleveland Indians’ leftfielder, 

I thought had the highest and sweetest cheek bones 

 until I met you.

 

LOCAL OUTLETS:  Broadside Books,  247 Main St, Northampton, MA 01060.

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Directly from Press 53—–Press53.com.

Can be ordered from your local indie bookstore or Amazon.com

PRICE: $17.95.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: hfaerstein@aol.com