Crybaby Bridge: Poems

In poem after poem, the pages of Crybaby Bridge present a series of tiny revelations, like in “Spontaneous Generation”: “I got alive / the same as you: / salt made // a small
reckoning.” It’s all so simple, so right there—but poet Kathy Goodkin’s sweeping floodlights allow us to see it. In this book, Goodkin observes an ordinary world with its small tragedies and workaday beauties—forests and fields that give way to housing developments, balloons blooming outside a party store, cars winched from rivers—and she gives it to readers straight. Goodkin’s several poems titled “Sleep Paralysis” offer a helpful lens for understanding the pictures each poem presents. When you can’t look away, you get a chance to take it all in, the reservoir, the larkspur, the slow and insistent layered growth of a city.