book reviews on Marc D. Goldfinger

Heroin’s Harbour Poetry Review During The Plague by Everett Hoagland

Heroin’s Harbour Poetry Review During The Plague by Everett Hoagland. Review of Marc D. Goldfinger’s Heroin’s Harbour ( Ibbetson Street Press; ISBN:978-1-79473-012-0)

I just finished reading your book’s unsparing, powerful, testamentary poems, and I have some favorites. I hope my specificity compensates for my late response to your strong work.

“Cotton Fever” is gripping and makes you the addict ” …body, mind spirit” …” as you read it.

“A Junkie’s Prayer” reminds me, as per ” “…please keep our needles disease friend” of when I was on the board of New Bedford’s grassroots clean-needle- exchange and advocacy organization for prevention of & treatment for HIV-AIDS. It was named Treatment On Demand. And we did good, meaningful, lifesaving work.

“Junkie Love” poignantly dramatizes the mentality of “stinking thinking”, yet twistedly caring, co-dependent addict’s love.

Some of your shortest, sparest, bare bones poems images and similes make them among the most powerful  ones. Your existential “And I’m Not Kidding” is one of those.

The last 3 sections of “Drug Store Christ (Heist)” are heart-wrenching! But with a grim laughing-to-keep from crying blues humor.

The succinctly & perfectly put truism “addiction only remembers what it needs” in the middle of p. 13 echoingly rings true in the consciousness and memory of any “clean” addict. And the bottom of p. 14 reminds me of the late poet Michael S. Harper’s line ” The first act of liberation is to destroy your own cage”.

Your finely and appropriately crafted synesthesia in the last 10 or so lines of P. 16 are perfect at what they do
poetically. 

 Your use of repetiton throughout the poems is excellent. “What Would You Do For A Fix?” is an outstandingly effective poem in that regard.

“Powder Road Blues” last 12 lines on p. 28 are as memorably truthful a testamentary warning to anyone tempted to try heroin as I have ever read.     

I like the way you humanize the experience of addiction beyond it being “bad”, “unfortunate”, sickness, plight.
Your take on the classic chestnut song of the same title. “All Of Me”, especially in its 4th section does this.

Again, the tale-teller’s grim humor works at the end of “Allergies”

Good allusion to morning-after, hung over Bukowski in “I Have Trouble With Names”. He would have appreciated your poetry.

On p. 48 I like the fine touch of “steel and stone” then “cast the stone”.

“A Couple of Kids” is as good a poem re: “the Human Condition” as I have read recently. A really poignant piece of work.” Seems as if I and everyone has seen/heard a young couple like that one in our routine daily comings & goings. A masterful piece of empathy-encouraging story-telling on just a page & a half!

I read thru page 70 and look forward to reading the prose pieces. You, your poems in this volume, are particularly adept at rendering, as if by surrealistic collage, the addict’s interiority, his/her inner landscape of a living nightmare.” This collection’s stark, haunting honesty communicates a vivid narrative of it.

What a meaningful accomplishment and body of work, Marc!

Again, powerful work, Brother. Thank you for sharing it.

Onward!

 

Everett Hoagland was the first Poet Laureate of New Bedford. He is a recent recipient of the annual, national Langston Hughes Society Award. His poetry has been regularly published in periodicals and anthologies for over half a century. One of his recent books is Ocean Voices, published by Spinner Publications.

Marc D. Goldfinger has been published by more places than he can remember. He’s the Poetry Editor and a regular columnist for the Spare Change News, a member in good standing with the Road Scribes of America. Goldfinger grew up in hell, conned the devil into letting him out and now works for deviant angels. He’s happily married and can be seen dancing in the streets at 2 in the morning, humming a few bars of the “Eulogy For Lenny Bruce” by Nico. Goldfinger understands that song. Heroin’s Harbour Stories And Poems by Marc D. Goldfinger

Heroin’s Harbour

Review of Marc D. Goldfinger’s Heroin’s Harbour ( Ibbetson Streeet Press) by Gregory J. Wolos

The Split Man

Heroin’s harbor is the addict, as Marc D. Goldfinger’s collection of poems and stories, Heroin’s Harbour makes harrowingly clear. Heroin is the body of the addict that craves the drug, and it’s the mind of the addict that cooperates with the insistent body, paradoxically rationalizing any action that might provide safe harbor for a poison. Human beings are frail things, ultimately, Goldfinger’s poems and stories illustrate, too weak to commit to our resolutions or to stave off gratifications that have become needs. Goldfinger’s work does more than merely describe the habits, lifestyle, and thoughts of a junkie; he takes his reader hostage, straps us to the back of his motorcycle so that we do more than simply observe—we participate. Goldfinger’s craft enables us, along with him, to feel the needle and the need.

In “A Junkie’s Prayer,” one of the first poems in the first section of Heroin’s Harbour, “An Epistle to Opium,” the reader is told what the junkie prays for: not redemption, not relief, not freedom from addiction. The narrator of this poem is so embedded in his world of dependency—the “harbor” of the drug—that what is prayed for are his most immediate needs: “please keep our needles disease free”; “keep us safe from those who would poison our dope”; “keep the police the police from our door”; “keep us free from abscess.” What is prayed for is not an escape, but that “heroin’s sweet sleep” will “ease the pain that lives within our hearts.” The junkie does not beg for a way out and doesn’t seem to want one, asking only that God “keep watch over the farmers and the fields of poppies they tend.”

A poem like “What Would You Do for a Fix?” lacks a religious core, but uses liturgical “call and response” and repetition to emphasize the all-encompassing nature of a junkie’s need. In this poem, there are sins against the family: “For a fix/ I would steel my mother’s purse; For a fix/ I would take my sister’s coin collection; For a fix/ I would desert my children.” There are sins against the purity of his own body: “For a fix/ I would risk hepatitis; For a fix/ I would shoot toilet water.” There are sins against society: “For a fix/ I would take the money out of the pocket of an unconscious man on the street, For a fix / I would sell dangerous drugs to novices.” Later in the poem, further biblical allusion occurs in another repeated construction: “In the beginning, I got high because I liked it./ In the end I got high because it was all I had left . . . In the beginning I got high because I was searching for the way./ In the end I got high because I was searching for the way out.” As the narrator concludes in “I Have Trouble with Names”: “Some of us name the Gods. / I have trouble with names.”

Love itself for the junkie isn’t to be found through religion, as Goldfinger testifies in “Drug Store Christ (Heist): “They tell me to turn to Jesus Christ/ Just wait till I do this drug store heist/ . . . ‘Well, we found God/Just sittin’ in the safe of that drug store.’” And True Love for one’s significant other, as described in “Junkie Love” means “giving her the biggest hit,” or when you’re strung out and broke and don’t ask her to hit the streets.”

Again and again, Goldfinger repeats the message stated in “Death Trippin,” one of the poems written in hard driving couplets that he suggests are “songs” but are all the more frightening in that they come off more as feverish rants: “One thing I know, Heroin’s the best/ For nullifying the pain that’s in my chest.” The shift from reading Goldfinger’s poems to reading his short stories is like a shift from listening to songs to watching a movie that uses those songs as background music. The refrain stated in the poem “Getting Fixed in South Carolina”: “addiction only remembers what it needs” throbs through the prose of stories that describe in detail the underworld of junkies. There are stories about dealing with crooked pharmacists and hard-ass police (“A Controlled Dangerous Substance Act”); stories about navigating life with various women who shared the narrator’s addictions (“Femme Fatale”); stories about obtaining prescriptions from doctors (“Running on Empty in Vermont”); stories about living in filth and failing to care for those innocents for whom you’re responsible (“Two Dogs and a Kitten”). The long poem “Getting Fixed in South Carolina” is itself expanded into a short story that depicts the life-threatening hazards a junkie will undertake to satisfy his habit. These stories powerfully convey the life of addicts whose focus is reduced to remembering “what it needs.” But even detailed stories are insufficiently descriptive, Goldfinger asserts in “The Rocking Chair,” which shows a recovering junkie’s return home to aged and ailing parents: “The imagination is limited when it comes to the real. Things get left out.”

Recovery for the junkie seems a struggle doomed to Sisyphean failure. In his second section of poems, “The Fight to Stay Clean,” Goldfinger presents several portraits of those lost to drugs (“Medusa with Fire,” “One of the Tough Guys,” “Significant Other,” “Open Casket,” “The Way She Shakes”), or those who will be (“A Couple of Kids”). But there is a whisper of hope in the sisterhood of “The Angels of Gloucester,” who “walk an ancient path now, join hands at signs of trouble, hug each other’s children, knit their families into hot strong blankets with threads of prayer.” Ultimately, Goldfinger points to the necessity of the recovering junkie never losing sight of the fact that he is “The Split Man”: two alternate realities, this poem illustrates, are perpetually present, contending for the junkie’s heart: “I am the happy married man/ the junkie in the street begging/ the house-owner sitting  sitting at my computer/ in the bathroom sticking a needle in my arm . . . / I am a split man, this half of me dances with joy/ I am a split man, this half of me is dying day by day/ I can choose, I can stand by a lake holding the hand of my wife/ or my choices are gone, I probe my arm looking for a vein.”

With devastating honesty and heartbreaking detail, Marc D. Goldfinger offers in his poems and stories glimpses into the lives of tortured souls who have abandoned themselves to an all-consuming, unsafe harbor. “A junkie’s body never forgets,” he concludes in the poem “All of Me”: “If it was just physical, I would never use dope/ again. It is not my body, it is me, all of me, my body, my soul, my mind/ interlocked in heroin hypnosis, even/ free, I will never be free again.” Goldfinger’s words seem less buoys warning of an unsafe passage than a testament to the hope of a single split man’s survival. — Gregory J. Wolos

Relationships | Reginald S. Lewis

RelationshipsRelationships  by Marc D. Goldfinger.

Copyright 2003  Ibbetson St. Press   25 School St.  Somerville, Ma.  02143

In this stunningly powerful book of 28 poems, Marc D. Goldfinger purposely eschews the definition of love and relationships as we know it–substituting the cute cupid, fairy tale versions of Juliet’s feverish, almost sickening search for Romeo–for tough, gritty urban poems clearly not for the faint of heart. With a stunning clarity his cast of characters speak for themselves–spinsters and hustlers and junkies and hookers who float zombie-like through the rough and tumble areas of Boston, Gloucester and Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the poem “The Wake Up,” the poet gives us a peek into the single day of a troubled woman named Mary Esther: “…shadows cast by life…grins down the throat of hard luck…and then he kisses her forehead, says, “It’s all right now, breakfast is ready.”

To most of us, unrequited love and adoration is a powerful emotional force in the crucible of the heart expressed in a variety of ways. But in the seedy underworld of drug addiction, the application of love in his poem “Junkie Love” has a different connotation: “…True love/ is spitting the dope/right down the middle/or even/giving her/the bigger cut…”

Goldfinger is not some queasy, apologetic poet. He wears his drug addiction like a badge of honor. Women blow in and out of his life like the wind. They share dope. In a ” A Couple of Kids” Goldfinger is an honorable recorder who witnesses snatches of a conversation between an innocent young teenaged girl who seems totally oblivious to her boyfriend being high on heroin as he rambles on about promises to buy her an engagement ring, relocate to the plush warm State of Florida, where, in a house with a white picket fence, they will live happily ever after. The girl sits in front of the 7-11, begging for spare change. Goldfinger ends the poem with a haunting scene that seems to portend their doom.

Yet like a prolific painter he beautifies the decadent lifestyles of these wayward souls afflicted with the hungry armature of heroin addiction.

And love is sometimes vindictive–like the woman who shredded Brillo into his spaghetti–and laced his heroin with digitalis.

These poems are brilliantly composed with the symphonic smoothness and elegance of jazz. The poet serenades the reader with the lyrical beauty of torch songs. This book of poems by Marc D. Goldfinger is a love supreme.

Reginald S. Lewis is a widely published, award-winning African-American poet, essayist, and a playwright — on Pennsylvania’s death row. He is the author of two books of poetry, titled: “Leaving Death Row,” at  www.1stBooks.com. His most recent book “Inside My Head” is available at www.iuniverse.com and www.amazon.com. To write to Reggie  Reginald S. Lewis #AY2902,175 Progress Dr., Waynesburg, Penn.  15370-8089