Famous Americans Loren Goodman, W. S. Merwin

This year's winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Loren Goodman's Famous Americans. Hilarious, eclectic, and bizarre, this collection takes the reader on a rollercoaster of a ride through the absurdities of American pop culture. Employing a variety of forms (from epistolary to script to interview and beyond), this work proves to be as much about exploring frameworks as it is about examining the lives of famous and not-so-famous Americans. Goodman questions our concept of what it means to be an icon: he disrupts our assumptions, creating an alternate universe in which nothing remains sacred.

Loren Goodman was born and raised in Wichita, Kansas. He graduated from Columbia University with an AB in philosophy in 1991, and went on to study at the University of Arizona (MFA, poetry) and SUNY Buffalo (MA, English literature). He is currently pursuing PhD degrees at SUNY Buffalo (English literature) and Kobe University (sociology). He lives in Japan and is active in martial arts.

"Famous last words for this terrific book are hard to come by but one such would be 'Wonderful'! Loren Goodman has made a veritable masterpiece out of leftover formulae for writing quite other stuff indeed. Famous Americans is my kind of people." Robert Creeley, author of Just in Time, Poems 1984-1994