Dana Goodyear's poems have appeared in numerous journals, including the Paris Review and The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She is the author of Honey and Junk and lives in Los Angeles, California. (Author photo by Lauren Dukoff)
"There's a vital shorthand used in these new poems by Dana Goodyear, beautiful cryptograms meant to be decoded by the heart, or the kind of angels found in Los Angeles. No one has sung this town such a lullaby since Joan Didion, and the stakes feel even higher—love, birth, freeway fever, dug-up dog bones, aging pornographers, night-blooming flowers with minds of their own, and a language anguished and luxurious enough for a torch song by Piaf."
—Philip Schultz
"The stripped-down and ignited style of these poems suggests at first an inspired wedding of Sylvia Plath and Nathanael West—but Dana Goodyear's daring voice rises beyond Plath's ashes and West's smashed Hollywood—into an utterly original vision of Los Angeles, its relentless decay and desire."
—Carol Muske-Dukes
"Dana Goodyear is a lyric poet descended from the Roman poet Catullus. She mixes realism with a lush perceptual awareness of the West, and an astutely sympathetic vision."
—Henri Cole
"Dana Goodyear's impeccable poems have the austerity of neon and the lushness of a Vermeer.... Everywhere, Goodyear reveals a remarkable ear for a rhythm that balances the classic and the spruced-up, diaristic demotic."
—Wayne Koestenbaum
W. W. Norton
