“[Anaphora has] heart-searing intensity. . .” —Library Journal
“. . . what is most remarkable about Anaphora is that it seems to have invented an almost entirely new way of processing trauma through art. . . as if the reader has been handed a thousand shards and must reconstruct an experience, a life, from its fragments." —Ploughshares
“Anaphora matters artistically, politically, and historically, and is especially welcome now, when writers with close ties to long-marginalized groups need to be heard with more urgency than ever.” —The Rumpus
“…a fiery litany of elegiac poems.” —The Arkansas International Review
“Suicide is its own River Styx. Its grief, a particular and dangerous passage that requires of its journeyman something like a second kill, a letting go of the life once assumed as understood. In Anaphora, Kevin Goodan's guide across is his dead cousin Jimmy, half-white, half-Salish, who, when he faced his terror of being gay, found his rescue in a noose. To make this trip and survive it, Goodan has done what the rest of us are too broken to do: he has learned the language of the dead. Each shocking turn of line and word found herein is not only a formal achievement on the highest order, but a rocking boat that carries us to hell and back, hell and back, until we have nothing left but what we ever had: the trip itself. Anaphora is a work of Art. Every time I read this book, I am left breathless, I am changed.” —Rebecca Gayle Howell
“How many elegies can one man carry? And continue to sing. Kevin Goodan writes his palm- sized poems, his psalms to resurrect the dead, so his dead may once more live: “my cousin’s tired of hanging….we cut the rope and burn the rope.” These are powerful poems forged out of grief and respect with a fierce and necessary remembrance,” for “the methed out ghost towns/to which our childhoods/ will always belong.” It is not about moving on this book argues, it is about never letting our gone friends disappear.” —Sean Thomas Dougherty
“Poems in Kevin Goodan’s Anaphora leap into grief head-on and with fervor, rather than in submission. The energy and electricity of language and iteration build a new elegy, one that resembles anger and fire as much as despair. “ —Natalie Diaz
