Nobody's Hell

Poetry. Goetsch collects the particulars of lives well-lived in friendly narrative poems that keep the reader not just reading, but thinking. The self is a ship in a bottle, he writes in a more pensive mode, You want to build it when you're young / but if not, no matter, the self / will be the thing in you that's sad/when the sun goes down. Ninety / percent of it you'll never know / but there are worse things not to know (from Short Song) and these poems help us to know, if not everything, at least more than we knew before entering NOBODY'S HELL. Douglas Goetsch's first full length collection introduces to a wider readership a poet of subtle technical skill and wicked good humor. But even more important than these admirable qualities is Goetsch's compassionate understanding of peoples' lives. ... These poems will 'stay up in the head' of any reader who cares about poetry, and what we do here, in our time.-Robert McDowell. Goetsch was a 1997 recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Poe