Lie Awake Lake

by Beckian Fritz Goldberg

Winner of the 2004 FIELD Poetry Prize, this most recent collection of poet Beckian Fritz Goldberg is a wry, elegant series of meditations on mortality and the body. Her poems are “breathtakingly beautiful and resolute in their conviction that words matter, especially in the fact of randomness and moral collapse.” (Bruce Weigl)

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2005

Reviews

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lie Awake Lake is filled with a vivid, organized disorientation that captures the emotion of significant loss and how we turn to poetry to help order it, to help make sense of grief's chaos. Vividly imagistic, lyrically powerful, this book's best poems are haunting.

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

some lovely language in here, but very few poems that caught me and held me all the way through. still, an interesting collection with some surprising and touching moments.

"Nothing wants
to be the body anymore.
Everything wants to be the soul
but something has to stay

something has to be the body."
-from "Lillies at Night"

"Then the doctor asked him what year it was, his name,
could he go like this and she bared her teeth and he bared his teeth
and he knew the year, he knew his name. The next day
he died. And the doctor was surprised as if it were some
bastard miracle, the soul saying can you go like this and the body
going like this."
-from "Like This"

[Lisha Adela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beckian speaks of how the desert and its cycles of life and death follow you everywhere. This book connects the death of her father and a body's experience in naming its parts with the greater world around us. She is universal. She is simple in language and complicated in meaning. Jorie Graham does not hold a candle to her.

[Patrick Mcgee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book of poetry. I get the impression this poet did a lot of soul-searching after her father's death on what it means to be alive, what happens after death, and a whole host of other deep issues. Just by writing it down, I hope she found some answers.

[dana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is my favorite of Goldberg's work...clean, abrupt in the most intimate way. Absolutely lovely, lovely.

[Mii · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great read!

[E H]

Absolutely wonderful. Unsurprisingly, my favorites were "Fetish" and "Blood."