“A book-long, disassembled keen, a reverse index of longing after loss, Rebecca Goodman’s spare Aftersight is a wonderful achievement. It is connected in its stillness to influences such as the ancient Chinese poets as well as contemporary innovation. Its clarity and dwelling-place: consciousness.”

"Aftersight, by Rebecca Goodman, could also be titled, the text found in Ms. Goodman’s book, “the book of wanting.” This is a book that ripples across the surface of healing, waiting and doubtful of healing, paddling above water and resisting the possibility of drowning. It records a complex desire, surrounded—because it is charted in language—by a structural scaffolding of symbolic meaning, using few of the traditional textual markers such as place or any chronology of events. Character is most important and still tenuous in Goodman’s landscape."

“It would be hard to overstate how thrilled it made me to read Rebecca Goodman’s new collection Aftersight. As in her earlier work, The Surface of Motion, the writing is always superb—and always deeply compelling.”

“All the echoes of memory and the rapidly disintegrating past come into play in Rebecca Goodman’s beautiful meditative novel—a chamber piece for embattled voices that unfolds inside the natural world. The narrator, taking on different guises, tries to make sense of what it means to be alive, “these things I can think and feel.” Goodman writes at perfect pitch, looking back, looking forward, on the border between holding on and letting go. I couldn’t stop reading.”

…[T]he power of this…poetic fiction—a fiction of a very real death—emanates from Goodman’s Stein-like maxims which help make sense of what is clearly, in her now fragile world, without sense, without meaning….Goodman transforms her experiences into a kind of mythic story that also represents her attempts to heal herself…[in] a kind of magical recovery….[P]eace and meaning come gradually through language, the very language of Goodman’s book….The private sorrow has turned into a public act.

This gifted author ends her work in a long prose poem titled “Night Garden,” answering, like Molly Bloom, “yes,” to the voyage into darkness, a kind of dream garden “full of green.”

Douglas Messerli
Exploring Fictions

The beginning of this poem...came about as a form of correspondence with the writer Rebecca Goodman, whose small book. The Surface of Motion show[s] a startlingly true apprehension of the brokenness of the span of human joy. Her willing participation in the broken inspired me, and as I wrote into the broken and breaking human seam or fissure a new life opened within the body of the poem.

I discovered poesis within the folds of my own desire and sensed a completion or longing for consumption far within the realizations Rebecca’s writing had intimated by way of a ‘storied’ prose....What body of verse couldn’t respond to that fissure within the emotive?

Tod Thilleman
from Three Sea Monsters

Rebecca Goodman’s Forgotten Night layers dream sequence with Medieval carnival and a necklace to offer protection with accidental artist-guides to the journey. Will the narrator find the meaning of the news-clipping her mother saved in her grandfather’s World War I diary? Will it lead her to a descendant-survivor of Jewish pogroms? Will she write her book?

Keep reading as you dine under bowler hat chandeliers, find hints in a Mendelssohn concert in a cathedral, in bird-man sculptures installed in a former synagogue, in lost dialectics, compelling beauty of grotesque altarpiece, and memories of childhood as language “raining down on my skin …”

So much is not known but haunts through violent sounds by the river, missing memory of the prior night, horror of village carnival that shifts to Kristallnacht, self that doesn’t reflect in the mirror consistently but might shift from self to mother to vacancy. But will the man with the movie camera expose another rise of fascism? Or if “to describe a violent act is to annihilate yourself …” will a fire dance illuminate our journey to sophia, wisdom?

—Deborah Meadows

Seas of memories, seas of written words, seas of forgotten languages. In an extraordinary tour de force of beauty, terror, and wisdom, Forgotten Night is a journey to one’s roots in a rumination on what it means to seek a past buried by local histories. Forgotten Night deciphers the meaning of personal identity in a postmodern dilemma, constructing identity from that which has been erased, with fragments floating in its expanse. In this sea of uncertainty of an uncertain sense of who we are, we connect.

—Noam Mor

With Forgotten Night, the Shoah becomes nearer to approachable in Goodman’s blistering, intimate, woeful silence. Goodman eases readers into a nuanced, personal, itinerant, inimitably American perspective on Holocaust remembrance. Forgotten Night should be required reading for those who recognize the need to continually reassess the incomprehensible suffering caused via unchecked nationalism.

—David Moscovich