To Be Read in 500 Years

So often (let’s be honest here) we poets will invent dreams, for our own strategic purposes.

But this one is real, and one of the few I remember. I awoke in the future.

—from “Mailbox”

To Be Read in 500 Years is the poet Albert Goldbarth’s time capsule for a future that none of us can now imagine—a world without mailboxes, without sexual reproduction, without oil or tillable soil, without the capacity to understand music or poetry or “love love love love crazy love.” Goldbarth’s smart and nostalgic collection of poems, spoken from that future’s distant past, reminds us of everything we have to lose.

Publishers Weekly

Goldbarth's ample output, frequently comic effects, reader-friendly free verse and almost dauntingly omnivorous reference-from Roman history to cardiology to 1950s science fiction-have slowed down what might otherwise be the widespread acknowledgment of an American master: that has started to change (he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2002) and might change further with this 25th book of verse. Here is "my shtick/ and my stump-speech exhortation to you, delivered in spittle/ and neural knot-ways," part of a seven-page poem that advises, again and again, "Keep a dream journal." Elsewhere is a five-part poem that seeks, through facts from William Carlos Williams's biography, modern cosmology and 19th-century typesetting, the mysteries of "whatever/ you call it, animus, or consciousness-the 'soul.'A " The sciences, "The Writing Life" and "Everything" make repeated appearances in Goldbarth's fast-paced lines. Yet for all his oddball flights, all his "waggly buggish-visaged aliens" and the like, Goldbarth returns, most of the time, to first and last things-to why some marriages (his own, for example) last: to how we deal with parents and friends who fall ill; to how we get all we can, and more than we know, out of life and out of death. (May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Albert Goldbarth is the author of twenty-five collections of poetry, including The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems 1972–2007. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.