GOSLING by Dawn Tefft
With Ryan Gosling's childhood and his various acting roles as a focal point, Dawn Tefft plunges into the machinery of spectacle culture and surfaces with a beautiful critique of the falsehood of a fixed self, particularly as it expands and contracts under the pressure of consuming and being consumed. The persona poems Tefft deftly sequences might be read as Gosling's multiple selves, which conspire to blur the line between the real and the performed real and arrive at a more accurate, more pluralized sense of gender, class and personhood. Few writers have the courage and the craft to balance shrewd observation with profound empathy toward their subject matter, but that's exactly what permeates these poems and what webs them together so brilliantly. —Paul Martinez Pompa, author of My Kill Adore Him
Gosling masterfully defamiliarizes the world of pop culture and its money, violence, scarcity, and beauty, while “complexity hums through everything.” Whether you confuse your celebrity Ryans or have a favorite one, or a “gosling” is to you simply a fledgling goose or a young, naïve human, reading this volume will deposit new sediment of meaning in your brain. — Snežana Žabić, author of The Breath Capital
Additional Info
GOSLING
eyes that look into your own
and see there the owls flying
a look that says “I can feed them
if you’d like, or I can back away”
something flutters in the chest
moves up through the mouth
a thing wanting to be free
or maybe test the rope’s length
we call and answer, call and answer
how do you really know who you are
until the host asks you to teach him how
to dance in front of the live audience
bullied, loved, led, and dipped
hands talked to his back
it’s not what you wanted, you draw
another
the tarot cards say over and over
“shaman”
occasionally, there’s also “magician”
which makes you doubt more
no way to be hoodwinked, no way
to lose that would be permanent
small losses, a punch to the face, gaps
in the years, maybe in judgment
most of what you do, you do to yourself
take it on the chin, maybe smirk
because you are your own center
you are both the Buddha and the seat
you carved for him out of cedarwood
on a Saturday
you once lived in a trailer
KEN
a boy doesn’t know
how plastic he is
until the waves break him
or a girl
if he were warm blooded
he wouldn’t need
a truck with big wheels
or to play a four-hour solo
everybody hurts sometimes
he’d recognize cursive
in marrying hot sauce to the right
cut of meat
not wait to take up baking
until he’s already a rancher
whose wife has died
a boy can pretend
his family are prize fighters
and he has hooves for hands
as he gallops the wreckage
left by his choices
it’s a long distance
to outrun canceled dreams
and arrive at a house
with a window
where he pulls back the fringe