FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA PRESS. NOW AVAILABLE HERE.
When she was a toddler, Jessica Goodfellow’s twenty-two-year-old uncle, along with six other climbers from the 1967 Wilcox Expedition to Denali, was lost in an unprecedented ten-day storm blasting winds of up to three-hundred miles per hour. Just as North America’s highest peak is so massive that it has its own distinct weather system—changeable and perilous, subject to sudden whiteout conditions—a family whose loved one is irretrievably lost has a grief so blinding and vast that it also creates its own capricious internal weather, one that lasts for generations. Whiteout is Goodfellow’s account of growing up in this unnavigable and often unspoken-of climate of bereavement.
Although her poems begin with a missing body, they are not an elegy. Instead, Goodfellow struggles with the absence of cultural ritual for the uncontainable loss of a beloved one whose body is never recovered and whose final story is unknowable. There is no solace here, no possible reconciliation. Instead, Whiteout is a defiant gaze into a storm that engulfs both the wildness of Alaska and of familial mourning.
Also available for pre-order from Amazon here.
Reviews here:
Alaska Dispatch News
Anchorage Daily News
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Glass: A Journal of Poetry
A Mountain Journey
Poetry Northwest by Martha Silano
The Rumpus
Think Journal 2018. "Difficult Stories: Three Women Formalists," by Maryann Corbett
Vary the Line Poetry Collective
Washington Independent Review of Books
Interview here:
with Sarah Blake at the Chicago Review of Books
Final poem of the book on Verse Daily here: American Dusk
"Test," from Whiteout (first appeared in The Southern Review), has been selected by Dana Gioia to appear in Best American Poets 2018
Unreachable
‘Regret has to be useless or it’s not really regret.’ ~Simone de Beauvoir
Rescuers did not find my uncle’s body.
But they found his axe at an icy altitude
impossible to navigate without one.
A little higher up, they found my uncle
’s sleeping bag at an altitude
unsurvivable without one.
You likely have a pen in purse or pocket.
Take it out and write a list of all
you need at your present altitude.
Next, change altitudes. Now, make another list:
the two biggest regrets of your life.
Take your time. Get it right. Because
here is all you need to know about need:
That list of regrets—cross one off.
You are going to need that space later.
‘Regret has to be useless or it’s not really regret.’ ~Simone de Beauvoir
Rescuers did not find my uncle’s body.
But they found his axe at an icy altitude
impossible to navigate without one.
A little higher up, they found my uncle
’s sleeping bag at an altitude
unsurvivable without one.
You likely have a pen in purse or pocket.
Take it out and write a list of all
you need at your present altitude.
Next, change altitudes. Now, make another list:
the two biggest regrets of your life.
Take your time. Get it right. Because
here is all you need to know about need:
That list of regrets—cross one off.
You are going to need that space later.
