The Goodbye World Poem

by Brian Turner

While Turner (author of Here, Bullet) grieves the loss of his wife to cancer, The Goodbye World Poem is a series of poetic meditations that sit quietly in the silent “afterward” of someone’s death. Losing his wife, his father, and his best friend in quick succession, Turner explores those relationships through the complicated lenses of moments in time, weaving in and out of memory to explore the disparate history that fuses together to form ones psyche. Throughout the collection, a prevailing motion that of submersion, sinking, plunging into the deep―whether it be the ocean or the subconscious. In other words, this book is a kind of poetic biography, a journey of the self that ultimately pours everything that’s happened in a life―all of the love and all of the loss―into the moment of death itself. The poems are meant to be celebratory and sublime in their comprehension of what happens to our memories when we die. And, if the reader is inclined―the reader becomes the vessel who holds all of this in their own imagination, carrying Turner and his memories forward into their own lives in a small way.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

Published September 12, 2023

About the author

Brian Turner is the author of a memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, and five collections of poetry— Here, Bullet and Phantom Noise; with The Wild Delight of Wild Things, The Goodbye World Poem, and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook due out from Alice James Books in Fall, 2023. He’s the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres. A musician, he’s written and recorded albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and American Undertow with The Retro Legion. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he’s received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.

Reviews

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully sad rememory poems of loss and family.

[Eric Chandler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Turner poses a question in the poem “Vigil” from his book The Goodbye World Poem: “How many losses will it take for something like wisdom to set in?” He goes about trying to answer it in this book and another one titled The Dead Peasant’s Handbook, two books in a trio that came out in 2023 that includes the book The Wild Delight of Wild Things.

I interviewed the musician Charlie Parr several years ago and he said something that sticks with me. He was talking about getting older and the loss of the skills you had when younger: “I have access to this thing for a while and then it’ll go away. Then, I’ll still be here. So, I have to reconcile. There’s a reckoning I have to come to. I think everybody does.” Everybody will face a reckoning with loss. Turner spends three books doing just that and courageously goes toe-to-toe with the loss of loved ones.

He addresses war in the poem “Historians” in The Dead Peasants Handbook: “It’s true. What they don’t tell you is how Death / comes hunting for the souls of those we love, / as well as our own. …” In the poems “Wedding Vows” and “The Weight” he describes how loss can be transformed into love. Turner ends this book with a powerful passage that is one of those most original ways to describe a loved one I’ve ever read. It’s a passage that reminds me to pay attention right now to my family and friends, before I reach the time of reckoning. I won’t spoil it for you, but here’s the beginning of the passage that melted my face: “I see all that you have gathered from the void / that assembly of the self.” You’ll have to get a copy to read the rest.

[David Abrams · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Goodbye World Poem" is just that: a long farewell to the world of a dying soul. In this case, that soul was poet Ilyse Kusnetz ("Angel Bones"), wife of poet Brian Turner, who died far too young of cancer in 2016. Out of the ashes of grief, Brian Turner rose, writing his way out of the deep loss. The poems collected here and in his other collection released this year, "The Dead Peasant's Handbook," form two parts of a trilogy about love and death ("The Wild Delight of Wild Things" is the other book Turner released this year--yes, THREE books in the space of just a few months!). The language here is intimate but universal--we all take hikes through the valley of the shadow of death at some point in our lives, with the Big D the one thing, the only one thing, that levels all of us in the end. No one escapes death, but Turner really, deeply examines it here. The resulting message is one of hope in the heartbreak. What's on the other side of death? If we're all lucky, it will be a 24-hour concert of angels singing Brian Turner's poems, the words lighting our path to the afterlife.

[Scott Wiggerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

The second of three (!!!) poetry volumes that came out last year by Brian Turner, an excellent follow-up to The Wild Delight of Wild Things, which quickly rose to one of my favorite collections ever. This one occasionally borders on sentimentality in its focus on the dead (particularly the poems about Ilyse, his late wife), but it's hard to write about love without getting sentimental at times; yet Turner also reminds us that "Tragedy isn't / a certain barometer of the profound." I underlined lines (nearly the entire poem in some cases) in poem after poem, and I starred or double-starred two-thirds of the poems here, including the title poem which closes this collection. Turner writes from "this quiet place I'm learning is the rest of my life," and he's never written a book I haven't been floored by! There's always so much to learn from his work!

[Laura Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this collective of loss and longing, the atmosphere is gorgeously layered in the same “way we understand water, air, drowning, or how the fog rolls deep…” A current emanates from the storytelling in the gestures of a beloved wife’s hands and rolls toward the “gathering of souls in the deep shadows of a mountain.” Along the way, it unearths ghosts and meets them clear-eyed on the porch. It sings into wounds while “attending to the difficult harvest of a life.” Fragments will mosaic into memories, and chasms will open deep enough to catch the bones of freefalling whales. Brian Turner writes with his “arms reaching back toward all I’d ever known,” earnestly attuned to the remnants and what can be gleaned in between— music, birds, paper lanterns, deepwater fish gathering to listen— “the finite within the infinite.” These poems are transformational.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful poetry. Not quite as good, perhaps, as the first book in this trilogy, "The Wild Delight of Wild Things". Yet in some ways more personal with details about the poet as a boy, about his brother, his uncle mother. The life that brought him to his true love, Ilyse, I guess.

Of course, there are good poems and great lines within but I would "The Goodbye World Poem" five stars for one single poem, 'Falling Giants', an amazing extended metaphor about Turner losing his wife, poet Ilyse Kusnetz, to cancer. A masterful, astonishing poem!

I always have room on my bookshelf for this poet.

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This new book of poetry by author Brian Turner embodies the feelings of grief that hit in the aftermath of a loved one’s passing. It captivated my attention in the way it worked its way throughout time and relationships, and while it all felt so heavily weighed down by grief, it still found things to celebrate. I still find myself thinking back to this book.

[Amy]

This is a stunning, clear-spoken volume of grief and beauty packed with gorgeous imagery. Bonus? The title poem, which is the last, contains lines from the poems that came before in this volume. It was such a puzzle treat to read and remember and identify. Turner has lost many loved ones -- his wife, his brother, his father, his uncle -- and translates his aching into tributes.

[Patrick Hicks · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunting collection of poems about loss, and what it means to love. Turner explores grief and what it means to carry those that we love forward in memory. A tremendous literary achievement.

[Anneliese Grewing · Rating 4 out of 5]

He beautifully captures feelings of falling in love, loss, and grief. My copy is highlighted and dog eared and will definitely be revisited.

[Karen Sofarin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I favored this lovely, sad and haunting work to honor love and loss. I am going to read more poems. This beauty slows my mind and spirit. Good medicine.