POETRY
Fighting Fermi
Fighting Fermi explores the pressures of the contemporary world - the violence on all levels of society, the division between people split by any number of fractures, the alienation created by social media culture, looming disease and population growth, the threat of climate change - on fatherhood and the guilt that comes with bringing up children in an uncertain world. These poems examine intersections of science and spirit, our lives in the moment and as works in progress, technology and nature while always leaning into questions surrounding the things that make us human - our relationships, the things we cherish, and the things we're desperate to hold on to but can't.
The Goats Have Taken over the Barracks
In The Goats Have Taken Over the Barracks , his masterful first collection of poems, Andrew Najberg has created something just for our his poems, full of musical and imagaic tension, are of the earth and the heavens, of the mind and the quotidian, of God and science. Readers, in the sure hands of a mature and talented poet, are offered endless insights in precise language. These poems are full of dark delight, provoking and providing pleasure all at once. Open and follow this poet through the thirsty orchard. Listen when he tells you the "Draught's been too long for figs to plump. / Sometimes all you pick are wasps in skin." -Kathleen Driskell , Author Next Door to the Poems
Samuel Johnson described metaphysical poets as ones who yoked together disparate perspectives, and its modern version is Roethke's idea of a poem taking desperate leaps. In Andrew Najberg, we have an wonderful extension of those poetics. We begin so often in a domestic scene that can turn elegiac as his description of crows that turns out to be a meditation on death. Or the description of an autopsy that seems like an autopsy on life itself. In the hands of a less masterful poet, we would have here we have a unique and valuable vision of the world. Najberg's is a vision meant to hold together what seems like our crumbling hardly ever has there been a poetry so needed in our times. -Richard Jackson author o f Broken Horizons and Out of Place
