Selfish: Poems

"If Goldbarth belongs to a school, he is surely its sole member. He's simply . . . one of our most generous working poets." —Rumpus


And you

perhaps don't like this poem: its free verse
or its narrative or the way it uses
gender or the heavy-handed
word-play of its title.

Like I care.

I wrote this for me.
—from "‘Try the Selfish'"

In his latest collection, the incomparable Albert Goldbarth explores all things "self-ish": the origins of identity, the search for ancestry, the neurology of self-awareness, and the line between "self" and "other." Whether one line long or ten pages, whether uproariously comic or steeped in gravitas, these are poems that address our human essence.