Albert Goldbarth

Biography

Albert Goldbarth is a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as the Mark Twain Prize for Humor. His most recent collections include To Be Read in 500 Years and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selection Poems, 1972–2007, both from Graywolf. He is the Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University, where he has taught since 1987.

See Work

POETRY / Spring 2012

M/D

By Albert Goldbarth
POETRY / Spring 2010

True Void

By Albert Goldbarth
POETRY / Spring 2010

Smallish

By Albert Goldbarth
POETRY / Fall 2008

The Lions in His Menagerie

By Albert Goldbarth

And for his human guests, imperial excess straining
all credulity: say a nightingale embalmed in honey
and stuffed in a swan […]

POETRY / Winter 2008

The Poppy Fields of Afghanistan

By Albert Goldbarth

appear overnight in the white gauze
soaking up her wound.

POETRY / Summer 2006

Not Sumerian

By Albert Goldbarth
POETRY / Winter 2006

Swallow

By Albert Goldbarth
POETRY / Fall 2004

The Song of How We Believe

By Albert Goldbarth

Give us an incisor, and we’ll rationally conjecture
an entire prehistoric head, to the glint
in its eyes and in the light along its scaled skin
—but first, we need that tooth, that seed

POETRY / Fall 2004

Stated Focus

By Albert Goldbarth

Late May, 1754: George Washington watches
as one of his confederates, the Iroquois warrior
Half-King, reaches down to the corpse
of a freshly slain French ensign,

POETRY / Fall 2004

The English Rat

By Albert Goldbarth

Brioche. Barouche. And one of them you can still buy, by the dozen,
at the sweets stall in the weekend farmers market; the other
hasn’t been seen in a century (although they tend
to blend, to be conjoined twins, in my mind).