The Goat Songs
vol. 25: Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry
- Winner of the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, 2017
April, 2018
Published
82
Pages
About James Najarian's The Goat Songs
The poems in James Najarian’s debut collection are by turns tragic and mischievous, always with an exuberant attention to form. Najarian turns his caprine eye to the landscapes and history of Berks Country, Pennsylvania, and to the middle east of his extended Armenian family. These poems examine our bonds to the earth, to animals, to art and to desire.
From “Goat Song”
I start up in my wide suburban bed,
patting the mattress, hoping they are real,
and call the names that seem to be for strippers:
Candy, Ceffie, Bambi, Serenade.
Just as the names come out, I understand
them decades—caprine generations—gone,
leaving me only with a kind surmise:
that somewhere their uncountable-great grandkids
are cramming their mouths with rose and thistle, breaking
out of other pastures, with some other boy.
“In blank verse, free verse, stanzas and syllabics rhymed with delicate quirkiness, the poems of The Goat Songs are sure-footed and nimble.” —A.E. Stallings, author of Olives and judge
About the Author
JAMES NAJARIAN grew up on a goat farm near Kutztown, Pennsylvania. He received his BA and PhD from Yale University and teaches nineteenth-century literature at Boston College, where he edits the scholarly journal Religion and the Arts. His poem “The Dark Ages” received the Frost Farm Poetry Prize in Metrical Poetry.
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