Outer Space: 100 Poems

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Reviewed in New Hampshire Magazine!

Praise for Outer Space: 100 Poems:

Ideal for dipping into, and as easy to enjoy as a glimpse of the stars at night, this anthology is filled with those tiny doors into the infinite that poetry is so good at throwing open.

—Robert Crawford, Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish
Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry,
University of St Andrews; Editor of Contemporary Poetry
and Contemporary Science (2006)

An eclectic collection of poetry from BCE to the present, which reveals our unchanging response to a starry night, along with our changing understanding of the science.

—Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Professorial Fellow of Physics, University of Oxford

We haven’t yet sent poets into space, but this collection is the next best thing.

—Sean Carroll, author of Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime

Through a myriad of perspectives, you’ll fly in space, visit the stars and planets, and explore our place in the
universe.

—Cady Coleman, former NASA astronaut

This is a wonderful way to experience the lure of the cosmos for humanity and our love of space.

—Sian Proctor, astronaut

Poets and astronomers often ask the same questions. Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Throughout human history, poetry has provided stories about what people observe in the sky. Stars, planets, comets, the moon, and space travel are used as metaphors for our feelings of love, loneliness, adventurousness, and awe. This anthology includes poets, astronomers, and scientists from the 12th century BCE to today, from all around the world. Sappho, Du Fu, Hafez, and Shakespeare are joined by Gwyneth Lewis's space requiem, Tracy K. Smith on the Hubble telescope, and Charles Simic, whose poem accompanied a NASA mission. Astronomers Tycho Brahe and Edmund Halley accompany modern scientists including Rebecca Elson, Alice Gorman on the first woman in space, and Yun Wang's space journal on travel to Andromeda. This collection reaches across time and cultures to illuminate how we think about outer space, and ourselves.

To Be Opened After My Death

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Advance praise for To Be Opened After My Death:

The first poem in Midge Goldberg’s new collection concludes “I need the frame.” Goldberg’s artistry provides frames we all need. Her compact poems contain and ponder a variety of objects, situations, and phenomena, from an ice tray to a coffee maker, from GPS to Minnie Mouse. Throughout this rich book, a rewarding principle prevails: Goldberg’s deft deployment of forms, and her wry and tender voice, combine to ensure that what her frames enclose they also celebrate. I’m glad I disobeyed the stern injunction of the collection’s title, To Be Opened After My Death.

—Rachel Hadas

What a wonderful collection…a genuine pleasure from start to finish. Those familiar with Midge Goldberg’s poetry will recognize her originality of wit, formal virtuosity, and knack for inhabiting and reinventing objects as commonplace as an ice tray, a hanging plant, or an empty shell, and making them extraordinary. Fairy tales are reimagined as “SmartTales.” A sonnet reveals Minnie Mouse’s true nature (and name). Workers at a place called “The Inn” disclose details of their experience with lively intimacy. Philip Larkin needn’t have worried that poetry could lose its “pleasure-seeking audience…the only audience worth having.” This wise and entertaining collection succeeds with flying colors in holding onto that audience for good. 

—Leslie Monsour, author of The Colosseum Critical Introduction to Rhina P. Espaillat

This may be one of the more accessible poetry collections focusing on mortality and the transience of existence. In seemingly effortless, irresistibly ear-friendly language Goldberg tees up her manifesto to resonate through the ages, as she grapples with humanity’s helplessness versus the devil inside, the march of time forcing us to move on from even our family members, childhood deprivations we spend lifetimes compensating for, music and poetry speaking across generations, parents realizing they may no longer be around when their children understand them, true love only being fully appreciated “close to death,” the ghostly resonance ordinary things acquire over time. This is light verse at its darkest and finest. You will have a blast reading these poems, even as they make you “watch . . . infinities blink by.”

—Anton Yakovlev

Snowman's Code

In her collection Snowman's Code, Midge Goldberg evokes the American northeast and connects those landscapes and senses to the human heart. With both wordplay and wit, Goldberg creates poems that are fun to read and echo in the reader's head long after the initial impact.

Snowman's Code was selected by Dick Davis for the 2015 Richard Wilbur Poetry Award. The book also received the 2016 New Hampshire Literary Awards Reader's Choice for Outstanding Book of Poetry. 

Midge Goldberg's poems are quiet and often witty in their tone, exact in their observations, deft in their technical expertise, and altogether a joy to read. It is easy to be beguiled by her formal brilliance—there are whole poems here that work out a single metaphor, a poem built entirely on an all but unnoticeable pun, a poem almost all of whose verbs are nouns—but what is most impressive is the poems' exacting, accurate realism, not least in those poems in which she shows us how elusively ungraspable the realities of our lives must often remain. The Snowman's Code is a beautiful book, one to welcome and be grateful for.

—Dick Davis

With unerring eye, Midge Goldberg zeroes in on the poetry in everyday life, things the rest of us overlook, and on certain rare moments of "random blessedness." She's widely skilled in the sonnet, epigram, villanelle, free verse—and, whatever their forms, the poems deliver rich rewards. There's memorable wordplay and engaging humor—as in "God Talks Back to the Baseball Player" and "North by Northeast," which proves that Cary Grant's screen personality ill suits rural New Hampshire. I can't yet swear that Snowman's Code is the best collection of its year, but here's my vote for it as the most enjoyable. 

—X.J. Kennedy

Based on its book cover and title, Snowman’s Code might seem wintry and bleak, but if you must think that way, don’t think Ingmar Bergman, think Coen Brothers. Midge Goldberg’s book is one to turn to when you know what you mean, but you can’t find the words. Whatever the situation, somewhere in Snowman’s Code, she must have said something wise, precise, and apt.

—Barbara Egel (Read Barbara Egel’s review in Light)

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Flume Ride

The spirited poems of Midge Goldberg alternate between tart bitterness and joyful celebration, and their craft brings the energy of daily speech to high form and the art of rigorous craft to casual conversation. Goldberg’s Flume Ride is an exhilarating ride from beginning to end.

Midge Goldberg's poems in Flume Ride are formal without formality, metered and often rhymed with the fine casualness and ease of movement commonly associated with free verse. Keenly observant, subtle, wry, and always embracing the world with a largeness of spirit and intelligence, Goldberg has crafted a unique voice. This is poetry of a high order, but it is also verse, kin to song and wisdom.

—B.H. Fairchild

Her poems, equally accomplished whether formal or free, will take you to new places; you'll be glad you went in this poet's wry, intelligent, undeceived company.

—Rhina Espaillat

I find in these poems exactly the qualities I would look for in a friend: intelligence, honesty, openness and warmth of feeling.

—Alfred Nicol

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My Best Ever Grandpa

This book, created with talented artist Valori Herzlich, explores the wonderfulness of grandfathers.

All of the vibrantly drawn pictures depict a grandfather participating with his grandchild in so many activities: from gardening, cooking, singing and playing the guitar to helping him fix his car.

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