JOHN GODFREY : A TORCH FOR ORPHANS
JOHN GODFREY : A TORCH FOR ORPHANS
JOHN GODFREY : A TORCH FOR ORPHANS
JOHN GODFREY : A TORCH FOR ORPHANS
$20.00

JOHN GODFREY : A TORCH FOR ORPHANS

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In the tradition of direct communication with the brain of the poet, this book is free.

— Bernadette Mayer

John Godfrey’s poems keep the figures and voids, the letters and haunts, the anthems and hums all equally active. They work perspective from the inside-out, making through their cuts the world be worn as seen, on the streets-mind and felt underneath. Living sonics keep time where decisions quietly and loudly get made, every line on in or about a plane, with connections. A Torch for Orphans turns out what it, being specific, and therefore mystical, is to be alone with many, to be many alone with this curious ongoing everybody, staying in the way of them who back walk, singing powerful unlikeness from the depths of the real spaces between us.

— Anselm Berrigan

A Torch For Orphans is a lovely book. Perpetual observer and arranger, John Godfrey walks city streets (and his internal cityscape) to give us a new music made of longing, people, weather, objects, and sensation. His poems walk the thin line between here and now—contingent but concrete, sensibly confusing, wise-guy clever, exquisitely sad, always sincere. Godfrey loves and worries over his world and everything in it, “Hiding love within wisdom/when eyes reverberate light/in otherwise/stupid darkness.”

— Lorraine Lupo

John Godfrey’s A Torch for Orphans typifies the poet in the world and the world in the poet—never missing the dreamy and transfiguring the banal. Godfrey remains, as in all his oeuvre, consistent in imagination, devoid of poeticism, occasionally laugh-out-loud. He says it best in “Whispers All the Time”: “he goes where many others / likewise are more than less asleep.”

— Paul Maziar

PAPERBACK. 96 pages.
ISBN: 978-1-950055-04-3