The Goldfinch Caution Tapes
£10.99
Winner of the seventeenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize
Alice Fulton, JudgeIf it’s true that every landscape is a self-portrait, then The Goldfinch Caution Tapes plein air selfies its way through small-town America. In these counties, acts of seeing and making share densely-tangled root structures. Your eyes aren’t bloodshot
, D’Agostino tells us, Your blood just wants a look / for itself.
That looking is where each of these poems comes from and heads toward, documenting the natural history of any instant. The narrative, tonal, and syntactical instabilities in these poems always find their momentary stays against disintegration in their immediate surroundings—river’s edge, rural cemetery, gravel road vanishing into field after field.
The Goldfinch Caution Tapes
D’Agostino’s poetry is inexhaustible in the most seductive way, and I say that with confidence after rereadings that left me boggled, dazzled, smitten, amazed, wowed, charmed … Though I can’t adequately express the book’s dissonant beauty, I can say it was thrilling to discover poems packed with infinite resonance that are infinitely fun to read … Like the greatest lyric poetry, his poems … keep … exceeding their bounds and creating revelation. What a surprise. What a find. What a cool poet. What a feast.
— from Alice Fulton’s foreword
This book is a heroic feat of observational meteorology, a rallying cry, and the now definitive handbook on Midwestern punk zazen. These poems move like David Byrne dances: they’re jittery, funny, and deeply soulful all at the same time. They perfectly demonstrate the wild beauty and strangeness of our predicament. ‘Just wait a minute and the bang / keeps getting bigger.’ This book, too, resounds.
— Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet
I’m not suggesting that D’Agostino is a seer, though he may be; I’m just saying that his poems run roughshod over the rules of our language—and in so doing they slam us headlong into genuine discovery: Instead of the epiphany of recognition, D’Agostino’s book offers experiences that couldn’t exist outside of their language, which makes our encounter with them not a recognition but a revelation.
— Dan Rosenberg, author of Bassinet
Sui Generis: original, strange, exceptional, solitary.
— Mary Ruefle, author of Dunce
Two poems from James D’Agostino’s The Goldfinch Caution Tapes
Last Search
of mine you’ll find antidote
and the one before that
anecdote. And before that’s
asymptote, but we’re getting
less and less ahead of
ourselves. I remember
the reflection of TV light
on your teeth. I’m trying
to sing but it’s coming out
gibberish, try speaking
in tongues and out
comes elocution. Again
the troposphere goes slow
coals and the window’s
last glimpse of it turns
out to be neon gyros glow,
and you go no though
even as you say it know
it’s pretty much yeah.
You can only get this
far out of your head—
pinhole stereoptic clouds
in the sky of your skull.
Belly / wing coloring
blinks sand to sea / sand
to sea on a swallow, but deer
is where god held the sky
when she painted it sunset.
James D’Agostino
Gorilla by Jellyfish Light
Baby elephant trunk-bumps the beluga
pod, and two months in I figure out why
I like animals touring empty zoos.
In desolation porn the world goes on
without our fingerprints all over it—
the best parts of us, wonder and awe,
if unsteady on glossy terrazzo.
On our handler’s social media
we’re only so free. Just because I am
also alive but still a dick, I pantomime
a coughing fit, walking the dog to get
someone up ahead to switch sides
of our street. I’m sorry. I’m worried
someone else’s handwriting’s going to
finish this, yours or a coroner’s, in dates
and times and temperatures until, 2 inside,
in spray paint on our door. The world
inside’s all eyelid light fixture just stucco
dreaming, under which we are each other’s
essential worker. We’re one another’s
wet market, open for biz, with a taste
for something. Carnivorous coronavirus,
scour in vain for us via cursor, where
a close-up microbe screams from all our
screens—risen hell nail face, muppet
fiber art fever dream, many-bulbed
edge of the Welcome to Las Vegas
sign, where for one night only
we’re here all year.
James D’Agostino
Excerpts
Two poems from James D'Agostino's The Goldfinch Caution Tapes
Last Search
of mine you’ll find antidote
and the one before that
anecdote. And before that’s
asymptote, but we’re getting
less and less ahead of
ourselves. I remember
the reflection of TV light
on your teeth. I’m trying
to sing but it’s coming out
gibberish, try speaking
in tongues and out
comes elocution. Again
the troposphere goes slow
coals and the window’s
last glimpse of it turns
out to be neon gyros glow,
and you go no though
even as you say it know
it’s pretty much yeah.
You can only get this
far out of your head—
pinhole stereoptic clouds
in the sky of your skull.
Belly / wing coloring
blinks sand to sea / sand
to sea on a swallow, but deer
is where god held the sky
when she painted it sunset.
James D'Agostino
Gorilla by Jellyfish Light
Baby elephant trunk-bumps the beluga
pod, and two months in I figure out why
I like animals touring empty zoos.
In desolation porn the world goes on
without our fingerprints all over it—
the best parts of us, wonder and awe,
if unsteady on glossy terrazzo.
On our handler’s social media
we’re only so free. Just because I am
also alive but still a dick, I pantomime
a coughing fit, walking the dog to get
someone up ahead to switch sides
of our street. I’m sorry. I’m worried
someone else’s handwriting’s going to
finish this, yours or a coroner’s, in dates
and times and temperatures until, 2 inside,
in spray paint on our door. The world
inside’s all eyelid light fixture just stucco
dreaming, under which we are each other’s
essential worker. We’re one another’s
wet market, open for biz, with a taste
for something. Carnivorous coronavirus,
scour in vain for us via cursor, where
a close-up microbe screams from all our
screens—risen hell nail face, muppet
fiber art fever dream, many-bulbed
edge of the Welcome to Las Vegas
sign, where for one night only
we’re here all year.
James D'Agostino
