Push the Mule

Poetry. John Godfrey is the ultimate American bard of the prose poem and our Rilke, delivering once-in-a-lifetime epiphanies in job lots. Reading him is hard because you keep hitting sentences whose truths are like heart attacks. You have to pause to make sure you're not dead. 'I love and fail with all my means,' he says. Those means include the soul of the language that lives in all of us and will do anything, seemingly, that its master Godfrey require — Peter Schjeldahl.