Goodbye, Flicker: Poems

Back Cover

University of Massachusetts Press Amherst & Boston www.umass.edu/umpress Winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry This distinctive collection introduces a new type of mythmaking, daring in its marriage of fairy tale tropes with American mundanities. Conspiratorial , Goodbye, Flicker describes the interior life of a girl whose prince is a deadbeat dad and whose escape into a fantasy world is also an escape into language, beauty, and the surreal. “Carmen Giménez Smith’s Goodbye, Flicker takes on poetry, family , myth, fairy tale, memory, love, history, and our plain ordinary human stories. Magic and invention are taken for granted. Cómo se dice is what all poems say. Giménez Smith happens to say so with deliverance and desire that can break into anyone’s heart.” —Dara Wier, author of Selected Poems and Reverse Rapture Open Goodbye, Flicker and enter the world of Owl Girl, Natasha, the Sliver Poet, “the most prolific girl in school,” a girl “poor /lazy/clever/long and golden,” facing always the eternal choice: “boy or liberty.” It’s as if Gimenez Smith threw a stone called “girl” into the pond of psyche—a psyche both personal and collective— and these are the ripples. The magic needle becomes the tool to “look store-bought,” the golden key the means to wait on “jordaches and polos,/husband and coin.” The archetypal and the daily—its engine of class, race and gender—come fully forward in this terrific book, where lyric and narrative modes play, where “Tale is a world/of condition,” where every She seeks to change her story. —Dana Levin, author of In the Surgical Theater and Sky Burial CARMEN GIMÉNEZ SMITH is the publisher of Noemi Press, the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol, and an assistant professor in the MFA program in creative writing at New Mexico State University. She is the author of two previous collections of poetry—Odalisque in Pieces and The City She Was—and a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds. Cover design by Sally Nichols Cover art by Isadora Stowe, www.isadorastowe.com ...