In the Days That Followed Poems by Kevin Goodan
Courtesy of Alice James Books
Following the news of a long-past lover’s death, In The Days That Followed grapples with the sudden knowledge of the existence of a stillborn child conceived out of wedlock and never named, and never spoken of after the relationship had ended.
How do you miss someone who you never even knew? It is within this distillation of loss, of distance, and grief, that allows us to form the unborn, the unnamed, the absent parts of ourselves into the language, into the land- scape, and give them a fleeting figure. By giving them a voice and a shadow, a gesture of acknowledgement, we can give a sweet farewell from the earth, from our past, and from their future they were never granted.
“In book after book, Kevin Goodan’s bright eye sees the world keenly as a raptor’s. Rapt. Raptor. Rapture. All meaning to seize or be seized. Reading In the Days That Followed, I am raptured. Hungry for each new page and grateful for the precise, lyric attention Goodan pays to the world.”
In the Days That Followed was published in May of last year by Alice James Books and is distributed to the trade by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution / Ingram, which can be found here for order. Kevin also did an interview with the magazine, which can be found here.
