The City Keeps: Selected and New Poems 1966-2014

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Description

John Godfrey's masterful body of work has sustained its attentive, lovesick, unruly energy for over fifty years. The City Keeps brings together the best poems from his thirteen collections, plus some previously uncollected. "Dedicated to those who people the City of New York," Godfrey's work is populated, elusive, and geometric, but also full of tenderness and light.

With an enemy
like daylight who needs
the psychology dime
Hips do the work
and I cross the world

John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013). He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.

Reviews

Godfrey remains open to the minute particularities and imaginative wanderings of everyday life--the multitude of wayward thoughts, musings and associations, the erogenous zone of thinking and looking. --John Yau, Hyperallergic His syntax, at once lightning fast and completely casual (like Patriots receiver Randy Moss), runs slant patterns across convention. He incorporates vernacular, he blows fuses on cliches, and he scalpels away bookkeeping words (as Pound called them) to jump-cut high energy, emotive phrasings. --Forrest Gander, Harriet (The Poetry Foundation) For my money, there's no one writing better. I give away most of my books, but I won't give this away. --Alex Katz, in an interview by Amy Summerland, Boston Globe Godfrey hands us great gifts of richly unpredictable language, "the power and felicity of pronouns," an ever alert eye and ear, and a particular human life: these are made manifest and shared with elegance, integrity, and a seriousness always kept from descending to the obvious or solemn by the poet's tough and compassionate humor. --Anselm Hollo His genius rings true. --Peter Gizzi The combination of his gorgeous sentimentality and irresistible philosophical hauteur is like a cross between Latin music and Schopenhauer--simultaneously drawing us closer and further away--with a strong American conversational tone holding it together. --Ron Padgett

Author Bio

John Godfrey was born in Massena, N.Y. in 1945. He received an A.B. from Princeton University in 1967, and took a B.S. in Nursing from Columbia University in 1994. He has received fellowships from the General Electric Foundation (1984), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2009), and the Z Foundation (2013). He retired in 2011 after 17 years as a nurse clinician in HIV/AIDS. He has lived in the East Village of Manhattan since the 1960s.