Goldbeater’s Skin

Goldbeater’s Skin

Center for Literary Publishing, 2003

Winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry
Winner, Greenwall Award from the Academy of American Poets

“Liturgical, intimate, and intelligent, G.C. Waldrep’s first collection, Goldbeater’s Skin, restores poetry to the natural and to its natural status as a creature bred of pathos and inquiry.”
Boston Review

“The poetry of G. C. Waldrep is a prolific liturgy, intense and conversational by turns. And the turning is telling; it comes round right. Bright idioms become bright branches, and the branches become the further architecture of Word. Christopher Smart and Hart Crane applaud these poems in Heaven because the Earth of these poems is true.”
–Donald Revell, author of My Mojave, Arcady, and There Are Three

“Goldbeater’s Skin is a gorgeous debut; reading these poems renews our recognition of the world’s precarious splendor.”
–Arthur Sze, author of The Redshifting Web and Archipelago

“In Goldbeater’s Skin, as in the work of Wallace Stevens, the reader encounters a fiercely intelligent and fiercely playful interiority that is astonishing. Displaying a brawny, hierophantic lexical range with breathtaking swerves into a warm vernacular, G. C. Waldrep’s poetry is made even rarer in its accomplishment by a lapidary tenderness.”
—Dean Young, author of Skid, First Course in Turbulence, and Strike Anywhere