Description:
Goodbye, Baby, Gaylord Brewer's first book of poetry in six years, is possibly his most personal-a taut and elegiac sequence of grief and loss, but also of lambent memory, of gratitude, of joy, delivered with lightning strikes of Brewer's wry humor amidst his signature brand of darkness.
Review Quotes:
Gaylord Brewer's magnificent Goodbye, Baby is everything a reader could want from a collection of poems. In this finely wrought chain of intensely felt and atmospheric eclogues, Brewer is the ever-aware shepherd regarding the passing natural world so keenly the reader can feel the globe turning page by page. These poems are full of our human and humane questions: as we age, as those we love age and pass, what will become of all it has taken us a lifetime to know, feel, and love? Damn. I don't know how long it's been since I've read a book so freaking good. This collection is a triumph!
-Kathleen Driskell, Kentucky Poet Laureate 2025-26
Goodbye, Baby is an elemental book, a collection of poems that distills chaotic experience down to its most essential ingredients: food, drink, blood, wit, travel, song, love for animals, especially a good dog named Lucy. This is a volume of twelves, of completed circles, of the faces of clocks, an American sort of twelve-line ghazal emerging, each poem an egg contained perfectly within its shell. You will never forget this loved dog, and the words she brought forth from one of our finest poets.
-Jesse Graves, author of Basin Ghosts