Trace of One

In Trace of One,real geographies merge with spiritual ones, just as details of the speakers physical and emotional worlds intertwine with the transcendent realms of science, religion, and myth. Joanna Goodmans poems share a sense of spatial and temporal displacementthey are love poems to a place, whether it be a field, a room, or a paradisethey celebrate their subjects, but they are also poems of grief and solitude. The poems resonate with ethereal echoes paradoxically emitted by an increasingly demystified world in which mechanical explanations for the workings of the human mind and body bump up against the mystery and obliqueness of the soul.