Jessica Goodfellow s poetry is eye-opening. A Pilgrim s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland carries the reader along on an adventure of provocative thoughts. Physics, Mathematics, and the Bible are all examined and re-defined in human terms through original and distinctive language. This collection will leave you craving more from this uniquely captivating poet.--Lana Hechtman Ayers, Chapbook Series Editor and author of Love is a Weed.

A Pilgrim's Guide To Chaos In The Heartland (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series)

Literature & Fiction

Goodfellow, Jessica

Poetry

Concrete Wolf

When she was a toddler, Jessica Goodfellow’s twenty-two-year-old uncle, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox Expedition to Denali, was lost in an unprecedented ten-day storm blasting winds of up to three-hundred miles per hour. Just as North America’s highest peak is so massive that it has its own distinct weather system—changeable and perilous, subject to sudden whiteout conditions—a family whose loved one is irretrievably lost has a grief so blinding and vast that it also creates its own capricious internal weather, one that lasts for generations. Whiteout is Goodfellow’s account of growing up in this unnavigable and often unspoken-of climate of bereavement. Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.

Whiteout (The Alaska Literary Series)

University of Alaska Press

Poetry. MENDELEEV'S MANDALA begins in pilgrimage and ends in pilgrimage, but nowhere in-between does it find a home. Logic is the lodestar, as these poems struggle to make sense out of chaos. Jessica Goodfellow reimagines stories from the Old Testament, Greek mythology, and family history by invoking muses as diverse as Wittgenstein, Newton, the Wright Brothers, and an ancient Japanese monk. In the title poem, Mendeleev's periodic table, sparked by fire and by trains, sees the elements of the world come into focus as a geometric pattern that recalls the ancient mandalas, also blueprints of an expanding universe as a whole. Throughout this book, Goodfellow uses and misuses mathematics, cosmology, biology, and etymology to push the boundaries of poetic form in a manner that mimics how time and tragedy push the human form to its limits. An examination of the history of clocks reveals that the human body is the ultimate clock. Aging, physical deterioration, and the disintegration of relationships are experienced as a ratio of what can and what can't be seen- the slow calamity of vision loss, both literal and metaphorical. Yet, despite the gravity of their themes, these poems are often heartbreakingly funny. Vacillating wildly between the consultation of gurus, monks, and fortunes tellers, and the chasing of reason as redemption in the face of impermanence, this book is equal parts wander and wonder. Welcome to the pilgrimage. "This book is a library whittled down to a message in a bottle. Here is a poet who has boldly refused to abide to the expectations of genre—but instead, pushes language and form as a means of asking the most urgent questions. The result is a courageous and kaleidoscopic, at times tender and vulnerable, exploration of motherhood and family—set against the backdrops of science, history, religion, myths, and mathematics. When a poet embarks on a book as myriad and borderless as this one, we are gifted the rare chance to stand at the threshold of a formidable human storm. And from here, it is clear that Goodfellow's MENDELEEV'S MANDALA is an electric book. But its lines are not limited to lightning. They move more like thunder, startling, resonant, and suddenly everywhere in the mind at once."—Ocean Vuong "Jessica Goodfellow has a joyous intelligence and electric tongue. Reading this book a first time, my only regret was that I couldn't read it a second first time. But then I read it a first second time and a first third. You see what I'm doing? I'm reading this book over and over, without ever completely taking it in. I think you will too. And like me, want only one thing from Jessica Goodfellow—more."—Bob Hicok "From the origin of the number zero to immigration to map making, these poems leap dynamically between ideas and a blazing exploration of language. Folding and unfolding with searing brilliance, these poems reveal our human condition with a down-to- earth sense of humor and wonder. This must-read collection nourishes mind and body and opens up whole new ways of seeing the world around us."—Judy Halebsky

Mendeleev's Mandala

Mayapple Press

The Insomniac's Weather Report, originally published in 2011 as the winner of the Three Candles Press First Book Award, explores the impermanent boundaries that define and - due to their nebulous nature - fail to define the human condition: those between body and self, parent and child, energy and matter. Shifting between formal and prose poems, the myriad voices in this book include an insomniac struggling to delineate the edge between consciousness and sleep, and a couple trapped in a poem cycle that is itself an interlocking meditation on the oblique lines between self and other that constitute marriage. "Jessica Goodfellow's debut collection The Insomniac's Weather Report is admirably diverse in its approaches and structures and reads like 'a fugue of opposites', integrating the scientist's persistent enquiry and the philosopher's rarefied obsessions with this poet's highly tuned and unique sensibility 'in a blaze of form and discontent'. With their keen intellect and capacity to hold ambiguity, Goodfellow's poems are most successful when their complex abstractions are grounded in the body, image, and the human. For this reader, the power of these poems inhabits that space where logic and reason fail, efforts to name and place break apart, and chaos threatens to annihilate. This is a challenging and original debut." (Mari L'Esperance) "To say that The Insomniac's Weather Report is exquisitely thrilling poetry doesn't begin to do it justice. Wicked and funny as an encyclopaedia of unanswerable koans, elegant as a fifteenth-century flowered silk kimono portraying, perhaps, 'a hinge on a hingeless door', it is also savage - containing a hidden history of 'marriage, / perpetual stagger of desire / and resist' - and I found it irresistible, as will you, dear reader." (Alicia Ostriker)

The Insomniac's Weather Report

Isobar Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goodfellow, Jessica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Goodfellow, Jessica

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goodfellow, Jessica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

A Pilgrim's Guide To Chaos In The Heartland (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Series)

Whiteout (The Alaska Literary Series)

Mendeleev's Mandala

The Insomniac's Weather Report