The Goldfinch Caution Tapes : poems

If it’s true that every landscape is a self-portrait, then The Goldfinch Caution Tapes plein air selfies its way through small-town America. In these counties, acts of seeing and making share densely-tangled root structures. “Your eyes aren’t bloodshot,” D’Agostino tells us, “Your blood just wants a look / for itself.” That looking is where each of these poems comes from and heads toward, documenting the natural history of any instant. The narrative, tonal, and syntactical instabilities in these poems always find their momentary stays against disintegration in their immediate surroundings—river’s edge, rural cemetery, gravel road vanishing into field after field.

''D’Agostino’s poetry is inexhaustible in the most seductive way, and I say that with confidence after rereadings that left me boggled, dazzled, smitten, amazed, wowed, charmed … Though I can’t adequately express the book’s dissonant beauty, I can say it was thrilling to discover poems packed with infinite resonance that are infinitely fun to read … Like the greatest lyric poetry, his poems … keep … exceeding their bounds and creating revelation. What a surprise. What a find. What a cool poet. What a feast.''— from Alice Fulton’s foreword


''This book is a heroic feat of observational meteorology, a rallying cry, and the now definitive handbook on Midwestern punk zazen. These poems move like David Byrne dances: they’re jittery, funny, and deeply soulful all at the same time. They perfectly demonstrate the wild beauty and strangeness of our predicament. ‘Just wait a minute and the bang / keeps getting bigger.’ This book, too, resounds'' — Dobby Gibson, author of Little Glass Planet

''I’m not suggesting that D’Agostino is a seer, though he may be; I’m just saying that his poems run roughshod over the rules of our language—and in so doing they slam us headlong into genuine discovery: Instead of the epiphany of recognition, D’Agostino’s book offers experiences that couldn’t exist outside of their language, which makes our encounter with them not a recognition but a revelatio'' — Dan Rosenberg, author of Bassinet