My Antarctica by Janlori Goldman

“In this stunning volume, Janlori Goldman undertakes a searching expedition, on which some world histories are visited, and old traumas brought home and repossessed.  The center of this journey is a searing “crown of sonnets” that enlarges the literature of that demanding form.  Poem by poem, even as we watch, Goldman transmutes the raw nectar of living into the honey of a deeply moving art.”

–Suzanne R. Hoover, PhD, Literary Scholar and Faculty, Sarah Lawrence College Graduate Writing Program

In the poems of My Antarctica, Janlori Goldman is on the move, engaged in exploring the terms of the heroic quest as she ranges over longitudes and latitudes of the imagination, from fraught interior landscapes of childhood to a rediscovered and riskily renovated home place and the far pole of peril and inner discovery. The poet embodies her own exploration, seeking to “chart my own geography,/how the body rises up/and away from itself.” She defines her destination as a journey: “I can split, be my own/fork in the road, lichen/growing over its gash,/or be the border wall/that guides my hand.” These poems lead us to lay claim to our own hearts.

–David Groff, author of Clay