Lynne A. Goldsmith

The engaging poems in Secondary Cicatrices span vast caverns of emotion, from delectable nature poems, to elemental love poems, to brutal poems about all-consuming addiction, the violence of war, and the abuse of animals.  In “Waterful,” Goldsmith carries the reader into the center of a river, where the speaker loses herself in rushing water, blissfully remarking “I am no one here” and “Overflow is everywhere.”  And deliciously, in “Snapdragon,” the flower speaks of the honeybee’s “hairy body tip[ping] my petals over/ every time until he finds my coolest nectar.”  These nurturing moments sustain us when we have to face the book’s unsettling explorations of human experience, like the flashbacks of war in “Splitting Wood” and the speaker’s uncomfortable acknowledgement that “there’d been some senseless pleasure/ in having been caught in a moment/ ruled by a mob, a force.”  Goldsmith’s eye is unflinching and compassionate, finding humanity alike in speakers immersed in the joy of the natural world and those who, in the desperation of drug addiction, commit acts of unforgivable cruelty.