Antillia
by Henrietta Goodman
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Pub Date Mar 01 2024 | Archive Date Feb 29 2024
University of Nebraska Press | The Backwaters Press
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Description
The title poem of this collection refers to the phantom island of Antillia, included on maps in the fifteenth century but later found not to exist. The ghosts that haunt this collection are phantom islands, moon lakes, lasers used to clean the caryatids at the Acropolis, earlier versions of the self, suicides, a madam from the Old West, petroleum, snapdragons, pets, ice apples, Casper, and a “resident ghost” who makes the domestic realm of “the cradle and the bed” uninhabitable. The ghosts are sons, fathers “asleep in front of the TV,” and a variety of exes—“lost boys” with names like The Texan and Mr. No More Cowboy Hat whom Henrietta Goodman treats with snarky wit but also with grief, guilt, and love.
Although memories pervade this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.
Advance Praise
“Henrietta Goodman’s is a poetry of testament, an ‘inventory of scars,’ a mosaic of shards and sorrows, a symphony whose movements straddle innocence and experience, whose cinematic cross-cutting of gutting images provides evidence of a wise spirit bruised yet irrepressible. Antillia gestures toward a taxing history of embodied travails, of ice apples, and ghosts, a lived terrain where Goodman sees ‘everything/trying to divide yet stay attached/at the root.’ Here’s a voice gritty, delicate, resilient, raw, a speaker with a handsaw who’s ‘no one’s wife and no one’s martyr,’ instead ‘a gasping head on a platter/of water’ whose eyes cast floodlights on the ‘Forty billion poison gallons/the geese see from air and mistake for a safe place.’ Savvy to feel gifted when the “ground is finally thawed enough to bury the dead”; brilliant to define ‘Happiness: the underside of a dried starfish,’ Goodman reminds us that a child can be ‘made of nothing,’ and that a single word can birth a shattered world of loss and misunderstanding in which we nevertheless abide.”—Katrina Roberts, author of Likeness
“Henrietta Goodman’s Antillia is a collection of searching lyric poems that remember, joke, free associate, interrogate, worry, and examine the roots of words in pursuit of sense or solace. The world depicted is one of potential chaos and harm, though a quest for love, joy, and understanding has not been abandoned. In one Proustian meditation, the smell of Windex conjures memories of the speaker’s grade school crush, yet further consideration yields recollections of a Cold War-era bomb shelter. The bewildered (or sardonic) speaker asks, ‘Windex leads to Martin leads to beauty leads to bomb?’ The volume’s title suggests that a new world might be accessed, though at present it’s more myth than fact. These aesthetically impressive poems stun with their vigor, candor, and wit.”—Christopher Brean Murray, author of Black Observatory: Poems
“‘In the South, everything bites / and f*cks and pretends not to,’ Henrietta Goodman writes in one of her trademark poems that are alive and daring and nervy: all heart and smarts, no pretense. We’re so fortunate to have this new book, which moves from lovers to sons to metaphorical-real lakes to a fancy cowboy bar’s ‘ropes / of neon acrylic squeezed straight from the tube’ to fine art to stinging truths—insisting on loving and facing head-on a world that keeps failing and falling.”—Alexandra Teague, author of Or What We’ll Call Desire
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781496236081 |
| PRICE | $17.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 88 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Drea P, Reviewer
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC!
Maybe 3.25-3.75 stars is a more accurate rating? 3.5 to split the difference? This book wasn't necessarily my cup of tea, but that doesn't mean that it's not worth a read. There are a number of incredibly hard hitting lines throughout the book that I very much liked. Here's a couple of my favorites:
"No cost to me or him, except my fear-- / gestating, unattached."
and
"You know I can't talk about lost boys without / talking about my son."
I have more but don't want this review to be entirely quotes. The description of this book talked about the ideas of ghosts/memories/grief, and that is absolutely an accurate reflection of the text. Overall, it very much gives the sense of being haunted; references to past lovers and sons and others lost over the passage of time. That's absolutely what kept me reading and why I don't regret taking the time to read it.
The part where one's mileage may very/where it wasn't really cup of tea was more stylistic choices than anything else. Beyond the ghosts/memories/grief theme (and sometimes even then,) I had trouble tracing as coherent a through line as I tend to prefer with poetry. The poems itself were more a polished stream of consciousness that occasionally made it feel like there were abrupt shifts between stanzas, even though you can usually see the connections upon a couple rereads. This might be an intentional choice, as the sense of disconnect lends to a floating/adrift feeling that definitely serves the overall ghosts/grief theme. Because the poems are so layered with references to other texts, events in the author's life, and possibly other poems within the book itself, it gives a view into the author's mind that feels simultaneously intimate and a level removed.
Overall, I'd recommend readers take a look at few poems first to see if it works well with their reading preferences. If it's your cup of tea, I feel like it could be an enjoyable read because of the standout lines throughout.
Denise D, Educator
Henrietta Goodman’s book Antilla takes its title from a phantom island that appeared on 15th century maps. The lush poems in Antilla (The Backwaters Press) continually question what is here and what isn’t, through ghostly presences. In “What Are We Going to Turn Into?” Goodman even refers to her son as pop culture’s friendly ghost after he has a scary stint in the hospital, thinking:
…how Gabriel’s father used to go around shirtless with huge
muscles and a huge grin calling my son Casper, how we laughed
together, and I’m thinking about that question, based on
the simplest metaphor I know, the only one that matters.
Goodman explores what/who is real again in the wonderfully feverish title poem:
https://www.poetrynw.org/henrietta-goodman-antillia/
Congratulations, Henrietta!
