I’m grateful to Joe Benevento, Poetry Editor of Green Hills Literary Lantern, an excellent literary magazine, for his review of my book Hold Still (along with 2 other poetry collections). Joe, one of the first editors to publish my work, back in 2002, said:
‘Diagnosis’ is one of the most darkly humorous poems I’ve ever read. ‘You’ve got a little cancer going on, /the surgeon said,’ is its first line, which has to take a feature role in the ‘you can’t make this stuff up’ trope.
She speaks across class, gender or education level perhaps more effectively than most contemporary poets as she delivers her feelings with humor and grace and absolute accessibility in a way that anyone who has had cancer would probably applaud.
Godbey presents a final poem with the simple title ‘Alive’ and lets us know, in a particularly poignant lyric that … she ‘rode into the hush,/ the stars sparking,/ and drank the dark,’ happy to see … ‘Everything alive,/ even hope.’
