Goldbeater's Skin

Winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize for PoetryPublished by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University"The poetry of G. C. Waldrep is a prolific liturgy, intense and conversational by turns. And the turning is telling; it comes round right. Bright idioms become bright branches, and the branches become the further architecture of Word. Christopher Smart and Hart Crane applaud these poems in Heaven because the Earth of these poems is true."—Donald Revell, final judge and author of My Mojave, Arcady, and There Are Three"Goldbeater's Skin is a gorgeous debut; reading these poems renews our recognition of the world's precarious splendor."—Arthur Sze, author of The Redshifting Web and Archipelago"In Goldbeater's Skin, as in the work of Wallace Stevens, the reader encounters a fiercely intelligent and fiercely playful interiority that is astonishing. Displaying a brawny, hierophantic lexical range with breathtaking swerves into a warm vernacular, G. C. Waldrep's poetry is made even rarer in its accomplishment by a lapidary tenderness."—Dean Young, author of Skid, First Course in Turbulence, and Strike Anywhere