Description: Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry Honorable Mention
The title poem of this collection refers to the phantom island of Antillia, included on maps in the fifteenth century but later found not to exist. The ghosts that haunt this collection are phantom islands, moon lakes, lasers used to clean the caryatids at the Acropolis, earlier versions of the self, suicides, a madam from the Old West, petroleum, snapdragons, pets, ice apples, Casper, and a "resident ghost" who makes the domestic realm of "the cradle and the bed" uninhabitable. The ghosts are sons, fathers "asleep in front of the TV," and a variety of exes--"lost boys" with names like The Texan and Mr. No More Cowboy Hat whom Henrietta Goodman treats with snarky wit but also with grief, guilt, and love. Although memories pervade this collection, these poems also look forward and outward into a world where social inequality and environmental disaster meet the possibility of metamorphosis.Review Quotes: "Henrietta Goodman's is a poetry of testament, an 'inventory of scars, ' a mosaic of shards and sorrows, a symphony whose movements straddle innocence and experience, whose cinematic cross-cutting of gutting images provides evidence of a wise spirit bruised yet irrepressible. Antillia gestures toward a taxing history of embodied travails, of ice apples, and ghosts, a lived terrain where Goodman sees 'everything/trying to divide yet stay attached/at the root.' Here's a voice gritty, delicate, resilient, raw, a speaker with a handsaw who's 'no one's wife and no one's martyr, ' instead 'a gasping head on a platter/of water' whose eyes cast floodlights on the 'Forty billion poison gallons/the geese see from air and mistake for a safe place.' Savvy to feel gifted when the "ground is finally thawed enough to bury the dead"; brilliant to define 'Happiness: the underside of a dried starfish, ' Goodman reminds us that a child can be 'made of nothing, ' and that a single word can birth a shattered world of loss and misunderstanding in which we nevertheless abide."--Katrina Roberts, author of Likeness