Kevin Goodan

Kevin Goodan Poems

Kevin Goodan Biography

Kevin Goodan was born in Montana and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation where his stepfather and brothers are tribal members. Goodan earned his BA from the University of Montana and worked as a firefighter for ten years with the U.S. Forest Service before receiving his MFA from University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2004. Goodan’s first collection of poetry, In the Ghost-House Acquainted (2004), won The L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award in 2005. In an interview with Goodan for Astrophil Press, poet Gregory Lawless noted the “breathtaking moments of solitude” of Goodan’s style, which “exhibits both pastoral eloquence and psychological intensity.” Goodan’s poems have been published in various journals, including Ploughshares, the Colorado Review, and The Mid-America Poetry Review. His second collection, Winter Tenor, was published in 2009. Goodan has taught at the University of Connecticut, and has served as Visiting Writer at Wesleyan University. He currently teaches at Lewis-Clark State College and resides in Idaho.)

The Best Poem Of Kevin Goodan

Untitled [Toward night]

Toward night, frail flurries of snow. Fingernails of willows scratching frost from the edges of the kitchen window where I watch the field beyond the fence where once corn was taller than a man can reach but now I gaze into the kitchen of the next farmhouse and watch the man with a bad leg hobble from sink to table to feed his mother with a spoon. I keep the lights off and study snow to augur from the flakes what fortune I may. The furnace does its duty and cars pass, swirls of flurry captured in fading prisms of red. If I stood on the road it would glow and crackle beneath my feet. The air would be muted, my own breath sounding as though it came from another body, a shadow leaning faintly toward me as though to whisper any comfort. Animals would unshelter themselves to stand waiting at the fence. Snow would settle everything. I would cup my hands, realizing I had become what it was I wanted to be. The body beside me would breathe on. The two of us.

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