Nameless Boy
By Douglas Goetsch (now Diana Goetsch). Like a Garrison Keillor monologue at the end of an evening, humorous riffs and tender anecdotes prove only partially effective at warding off a deep melancholy in this poet's third full-length collection. You can laugh at light verse such as "Pee on Your Foot", and a few pages later, be slain by the self-lacerating loneliness of "Forgiveness Poem". Sometimes the shift stuns you with surprise in the same poem, as when a tongue-in-cheek tribute to 1989's morning radio mix ends with the questioning of a worker's hopeless endurance, reminiscent of Philip Levine. In their unpretentious way, these narratives hope to heal the deepest wound of ordinary life: that of never really knowing the people close to us, or being known. Both this theme and the title seem to take on an additional significance from Goetsch's post-publication gender transition. The book closes with a delightful, multi-part fantasy about names and whether they determine our destiny, the poem itself a gift for a boy who is named at the end.
Source: https://www.amazon.com/Nameless-Boy-Douglas-Goetsch/dp/1932535314
