Benjamin Goluboff

In this collaborative poetic endeavour, Benjamin Goluboff (Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse) and Mark Luebbers (Flat Light) project the lives of eclectic and memorable people through speculative biography. Renowned in their use of this poetic style, here we see the likes Robert Frank, Bill Evans, Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, and others in imagined glimmers from their lives. In unique work that follows in the line of Spoon River Anthology, we are invited along for poetic experience that couples historical fact with deep-dive lyric experience. These are poems of experience, ones that let readers feel and hear and witness history in a way that makes it very real, almost personal, and leaves a lasting memory and lingering feelings.

In the city of Laquan McDonald and in the season when some white Americans are beginning to learn that black lives matter, it would be absurd to set myself up as an apologist for the white gaze. I seek to describe its interiority, and to suggest something of what it's like to live within its limitations.

Almost fifty years after his death, Ho Chi Minh remains a deeply divisive figure -- heroic revolutionary, or brutal dictator, depending on your perspective on the Vietnam wars. Not overtly political, the poems in this collection interrogate Ho's life and wars with a lyricism that is both dark and inventive. Many versions of the man inhabit these poems: Ho as trickster and tyrant, lover and ghost. Goluboff's imagination travels from fact to fancy with disarming grace. This debut collection also includes a suite of poems about photographs of and by Allen Ginsberg, and another group whose subjects range from classic photographs to Chicago graffiti and the battle of Fredericksburg. Entertaining and deftly voiced, these are poems that will stay with you