New Yorker staff writer and poet, Dana Goodyear, has released a second collection, The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard.  While operating in lyrical form and style, absurd and slightly apocalyptic tones hold the reader to the at-hand assembly of her images and away from complete comprehension. Seems an appropriate response when living in Los Angeles. From 'Freeway': 

........................... but the pool is full

of flames, and the trees are ash shadows,

and the sky's so dark night-blooming whites

release themselves to moths
too singed to reach them. The yellow vine
presses its wax ear against the warping glass,

and the deck chairs, pale and worked
as skeletons, somehow hold their ground.

And from the LA Times:

"There's something about the shape that a poem takes in my mind before I write it that has to do with suddenness," Goodyear says.....  “For me, it makes sense to address shocking experiences through poems because of the way poems also have that effect on the reader......" 

Where Goodyear's narrative style takes time to unroll, her poems are terse and framed with a sharp immediacy. Most of the poems are brief, distilled to the core. 

"The poems are very much engaged with dealing with a new landscape, apprehending a new environment, getting my bearings," Goodyear says........ set against "this sort of deteriorating beautiful, quasi-natural, quasi-artificial landscape that is modern contemporary Los Angeles."

Yet the landscape is more stage than point of contemplation.

Ultimately, Goodyear says, she tries in her poems to "come to terms with some of the basic forces of nature that all human beings try to come to terms with. Poems about decay and regeneration, and birth and death — a lot of the paired opposites that people write poems about."