Books

“Terry Godbey’s poems are sensual, with such acidity. We have to look around after reading them, to see if we’ve been caught.” – John Paul O’Connor

“Honest, gritty, blunt at times, always brave, her work is reminiscent of Sharon Olds and Kim Addonizio, but most of all, reminds me of the songwriting of Lucinda Williams.” – Nancy A. Henry

Survival’s aftermath: ‘Everything alive, even hope’

“Terry Godbey’s Hold Still finds its center of gravity in the poet’s experience with breast cancer. These finely made poems trace the narrative arc of illness—moving from the shock of diagnosis through treatment to the aftermath of survival, ‘everything alive,/ even hope.’ Keenly aware that there is ‘much to measure’ in this world, Godbey reminds us that one of poetry’s highest purposes is to revise trauma, and in her lines, ‘find what will save’ us. – Claudia Emerson

“In Hold Still, Terry Godbey surpasses all her previous prize-winning volumes, and we deepen with her in our reading of these poems. My favorite is her denunciation of the color pink in all its emanations, be they well-intended or hypocritical. Godbey’s poems, many of them about her battle with breast cancer, take us to the Infra-Red-Ultra-Violet Antipodes where the greatest works of literature reside and abide. There is no going back from them.” – Gerald Locklin

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‘A nuanced journey into the landscape of the interior’

“Terry Godbey is both poet and hypnotist in these startling poems. I held each one close, like a lit match, until it burned. A hunger smolders in this book, one brought to life after divorce, after the tomboy ways of youth and the body’s betrayal, and this hunger is infectious, leaving one to ‘wonder where creatures go/when they can go anywhere.’ ” – Alison Pelegrin

“Terry Godbey’s Flame is a nuanced journey into the landscape of the interior, where our lives are tangled in beauty and ruin, season after season. It is a collection filled with courage, deep recognition and a necessary fire capable of enduring the losses a lifetime brings. In Flame, the human heart refuses to silence the desire that keeps it alive.” – Brian Turner

The cover of Flame was designed by Claire Zoghb

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Winner of Quercus Review Press Annual Book Award

“Terry Godbey’s Beauty Lessons is a poetic homage to the fearlessness of women and girls, beginning with learning to ride a bicycle in a dream and ending in triumph over fears and betrayals. … Most dazzling are her apostrophic meditations, and a metonymic range that dances among cereal and war games, test pilots, earthquakes and sonic booms. These poems open onto a journey through the whole of a life thus far, and throughout the reader feels buoyed on the fountain of air that held up the rider in the dream.” – Carolyn Forché

“Terry Godbey’s  Beauty Lessons are dynamic narratives of loss and recovery that wrestle with motherhood, domesticity, the body’s frailties, and the unleashed wilderness of desire sucked on ‘like peppermints.’ There is plenty of regret here, and yet, ultimately, this is a book about triumph and redemption: ‘Hurry and pick yourself up / it is enough right now / to eat and drink / and save your own life.’ ” – Dorianne Laux

The cover of Beauty Lessons was designed by Claire Zoghb

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Winner of Slipstream Press Annual Chapbook Contest

“These powerful poems explore desire, desire that never stops, even while we may pretend otherwise, desire that the light slipping out beneath the closed door means someone is waiting for us there.” – Jim Daniels “Her beautiful, quiet voice speaks loudly for women in a compelling vernacular that men, too, will understand and treasure.” – Philip F. Deaver

“What is paradoxical . . . is that while Godbey’s language has all the direct simplicity of daily usage, the energy and density characteristic of a poet like Sharon Olds, the poems themselves are, again like Olds, unpredictable.” – Adrianne Kalfopoulou in CALYX “Godbey gives a fresh voice to the ups and downs of life by filling those moments of delight and despair with magic and mystery. With her words, we see the extraordinary just behind the ordinary.” – Heather Jane Collings in Main Street Rag

“Godbey is urging us to see that behind every door and within every person there lies a struggle between past and present, innocence and experience, which we all need to understand and explore.” – Kate Browne in Green Hills Literary Lantern

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