Description:
Faraway Tables is a mesmerizing collection of poetry that captures the monumental and the mundane with eloquent precision. Written largely during the Covid pandemic, these poems are imbued with a reflective depth that explores the essence of human experience—ranging from the personal to the geopolitical.
Goodman’s insightful observations of life’s transitions, especially in a world reshaped by pandemic isolation and technological shifts, reveal the courage it takes to love a life that’s continuously evolving.
Faraway Tables invites readers to savor the delicate flavors of experience, the tender beauty of other places and other times, and the enduring connections that define our shared humanity.
Author bio:
Eric D. Goodman lives and writes in Maryland. He’s the author of six previously published books of fiction. More than a hundred of his short stories, articles, and travel stories have been published in literary journals, magazines, and periodicals. Eric’s recent poetry has been featured in more than twenty publications, including Gargoyle Magazine and The Main Street Rag. Learn more about Eric and his writing at www.EricGoodman.com
Advanced Praise:
Faraway Tables is a dazzling collection—a mixture of the mundane and the monumental that travels to marvelous times and places in the world and in the heart, with surprise detonated in many of the poem’s last lines. Travel around the world with stops at enlightenment, enchantment, and memorable experience.
· Toby Devens, My Best Mid-Life Crisis (Yet), Barefoot Beach
If life is an invitation, poetry helps us to recall how we show up. These poems are condensed journeys reminding us of what shapes us and how each unique ingredient makes a poem of us.
· Deanna Nikaido, Voice Like Water, How to Write A Poem, Vibrating With Silence
Eric D. Goodman has always been known for taking the long view of life, as his novel Womb demonstrates, an unborn child looking into the abyss of a future all tangled up with the past. Now, in his debut poetry collection, he takes the same perspective, only this time it’s more pithy, more concise. Goodman’s poetry ranges around the world.
While Goodman can lyrically capture the personal distress of the Russian invasion of Ukraine through reflections on friendships, he can also nostalgically evoke the joy of the faraway tables in a Munich beer hall or a Portuguese pub—or the feast-day table at his 1994 Russian wedding.
Largely composed during the Covid pandemic, the poems in this collection reveal a mind brooding on the vastness of experience and the essential values that make life worth living, from family and culture to nature and friendships.
· Charles Rammelkamp, Field of Happiness, Mortal Coil, Catastroika, American Zeitgeist
Eric D. Goodman writes with such a light hand. He sees endearing details in everyday happenstances—playful, erudite, perceptive. Norman Rockwell in words.
· Hezekiah Scretch, poetry editor, Fleas on the Dog Literary Journal
“I had only to let go of myself.” With the insight of a global citizen and his cheeky good humor, Eric D. Goodman challenges us to let go of self and traverse unfamiliar climes, from the streets and suburbs of Baltimore to post-Soviet St. Petersburg, a Scottish pub, a public bath in Budapest, and beyond. Goodman’s collection Faraway Tables carries its readers across boundaries—the personal, the political, and the geopolitical—and into those vital realms of memory and time that recall us to the comfort, the connections, and the love that see us home.
· Sherry Audette Morrow, Välittää
The poems of Faraway Tables explore the transition of life into middle age, through Covid, renegotiating connections that become increasingly distant through technology, and the struggles of maintaining relevance in a freshly foreign world. The poems navigate the competition of desire to control and to relinquish control, the grief of releasing what was and struggle to love what is.
Goodman considers his transformation into wildness during the years of pandemic-induced isolation, and notes the world likewise becoming less tame—vacation travel memories usurped by destruction and recent war, concerns about the world his children inherit. He is confronted with a surreal metamorphosis in mirrors and headlines.
Goodman’s thoughtful explorations of his place in a world nearly out of grasp offer insight into the courage necessary to love a life that’s no longer altogether familiar.
· Barbara DeCesare, Silent Type, JigSawEyeSore
Faraway Tables is a postpandemic Lost and Found in which the quotidian is remade and emulsified in the stuck clock of memory. Redolent with palaver and puns, plus the guitarra of fado and the cuckoo of good times, these poems—replete with the provenance of nostalgia—are time capsules in the armchair tourist’s pillbox. Goodman’s reminiscences have a quiet exuberance, like finding a table for two in one’s mind, the intimate conversation is a duet between the white noise of clanking cutlery and the rhythms of recollection.
· Kim Gek Lin Short, China Cowboy, Run
Trim Size: 6×9
Page count: 114
