The Sun Held the Dice
by John Goode

John Goode isn’t out to tickle your ear with a little alliteration or a serving of assonance (although he’s not averse to either). Rather, through plane-shattering imagery and Cubist juxtapositions, he’s out to rearrange your universe, punch holes in your complacency, bend spacetime to his will—or simply leapfrog it into another dimension. Tell me again: how many planets orbit our Sun and which one is this?

—Vincent Czyz, author of Adrift in a Vanishing City and The Christos Mosaic

In “Ars Poetica,” Archibald MacLeish explains that “A poem should be palpable and mute / As a globed fruit” and “A poem should not mean / But be.” John Goode’s polychromatic book The Sun Held the Dice is the embodiment of these tenets: the poems are busy and do a lot of heavy lifting, and yet they are often as still and rooted as the globed fruit that MacLeish envisions. Goode’s intensely surrealist shoptalk is indeed palpable, with a worldview seen through an imagistic lens. Brilliantly bridging the chasm between linear poetry and prose, and shifting easily from minimalist couplets to meaty flash fiction, there is a cinematic quality to Goode’s buildup and scene-setting. He renders fluent and fluid poems that border on magical realism, and yet contain enough familiarity to lull and becalm the reader. While the first section focuses on the pandemic, proceed with caution: these are not your mama’s pandemic poems. They cut a wide swath, from Italy to Indiana, making variegated pit stops en route to Pluto, and striking the pitch-perfect tonal chords of risk and randomness that are the hallmarks of the plague itself. In Goode’s poem “Notes from a Midwestern Winter,” he states that “my blood gallops”—and the same can surely be said about the blazing parlance of this linguistically limber and distinctively daring wordsmith.

—Cindy Hochman, Editor of First Literary Review-East and author of Telling You Everything

Read excerpts from The Sun Held the Dice