Good People

Kevin Prufer's Good People wonders, "What can poetry preserve against erasure?" as history presses in.

In Kevin Prufer's eleventh collection, Good People, the uneasy forces of history, imagination, and memory collide. As morally dubious characters remember only the events that suit their stories best, narratives fracture and decades collapse across a single line break. Published under the setting sun of the American dream, these poems exhume the mundane violences that belie our modern comforts: A television broadcasts scenes of war into an otherwise cozy living room; a kitten, asleep in a truck engine, perishes at the turn of the ignition. Shifting effortlessly from brutal to tender, darkly comic to philosophical, Good People asks us, good people ourselves, what our relationship to history must be when "the present has nothing to say back to it / that it can hear."