Published by The Puddin’head Press
Perfect Bound, 51 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches, 2007
ISBN# 978-0-9724339-7-6
$12.00
Praise for Imaging Center
Sandy Goldsmith’s poems explore images of childhood and loss, illness and recovery, journey and revelation. There is an honesty here, mirrored in unexpected insights, unnerving or joyous, which challenge us to join this poet in her experiences and center on truths that also reflect our own.
– Tom Roby, Poets’ Club of Chicago
In Imaging Center the privileged reader obtains X-ray vision into the soul of a woman with sensibilities both commonplace and astoundingly beautiful. At once tender and perceptive, wounded and vulnerable, the persona strips off all pretense to reveal bare-bones of feeling. The trappings of prosperity are given texture by the suffering of ancestors, and the menace of disease is enhanced by recollections of a mother’s ordeal. Images layer, entwine, and overlap to render viable the breadth of womanhood in all its complex and interdependent aspects. This is a profoundly astute and healing collection of poems. – Maureen Tolman Flannery, Author of Ancestors In The Landscape, and Editor of Knowing Stones
In the seeds we grow from are the seeds of our death. In the shadows between the images of our bone and flesh are our dreams and those things that make us grow beyond ourselves. This is a magnificent book, an imaging center that takes one from the stone cold precision of the cancer ward where X-ray machines view the most hidden details of a woman’s body to the associative nonlinear musical imagery that transcends life and yet illuminates how individual and unique we each are, and with what hidden depths that cannot be probed without our will. This is a book to fall in love beside. – Jared Smith, Author of Lake Michigan and Other Poems, and Where Images Become Imbued With Time.
About Sandy Goldsmith
Growing up, Sandy Goldsmith lived in many different neighborhoods of Chicago. Shortly after her marriage she moved to Munster, Indiana where she raised her two children. Sandy then finished her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature at Roosevelt University, after which she taught courses in reading and writing. Later, she joined the faculty in the Department of English and Philosophy at Purdue University Calumet, where she taught a variety of courses including creative writing.
Sandy has been writing poetry since college. In her poetry are experiences of handing down family traditions as granddaughter, daughter, mother, and grandmother. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Skylark, Rockford Review, The Lucid Stone, Rambunctious Review, and Rhino. She has performed her work at all the major poetry venues in the Chicago area. She has won prizes from Poets and Patrons, Triton College, and The Pennsylvania Poetry Society. She is a recipient of the Joanne Hirshfield Memorial Prize for Poetry. She is a long time member of The Poets’ Club of Chicago. Sandy lives in Chicago with her husband Marshall. They frequently visit Maryland to spend time with their children and grandchildren.
Contents
Rewinding The Reel
Flight
Holding On Tight
Nestling
Chain Of Tenderness
Journey
Thimble
Mother Never Talked About The Old Country
Sisters
The Eyes Of A Child
Altered State
Fifty-Times-Two
Royal Doulton Figurine
Essence
The Mother, The Child
Imaging Center
Apology
Will
Recital
Face To Face
High School
Mother-Daughter Visit
Clockwork
A Visit To Auschwitz
Homogeneity Gone Awry
Only A Word
Traveling Light
The Instant Darkness Comes
Winter Cuts
Keepsake
Light
Transformation
Reconstructive Surgery Countdown For A Control Freak
Boys And Men
Sunday
Baby Blue
Kindred Spirits
Recovery Room
Lunch With Helene
Still Lost At 64
Your Desert Lily
Exposed
Excerpt
Thimble
Father and Mother pinafore the little girl,
muff her ears, glove her hands
against cripples in Douglas Park
reaching for pennies.
On straw-like streetcar seats
they gather her ruffles
away from elbows and satchels,
onion-scented jackets.
At Lake Michigan
they inner-tube waves,
shore her from the undertow,
sieve dirty sands to sterile white.
In a blooming garden
they thimble her fingers from thorns.
Imaging Center
In the holding room we sit side by side,
feigning concentration on magazines and books,
holding ourselves together in pale-blue wrap-arounds
adjusted on the side by skinny straps
for any size or shape of body.
Size and shape hardly matter,
our cleavage-pride now a silly pretense,
all nutrition for our progeny
drained out and dried up,
our reasons-for-being,
no longer viable.
The workers appear now in the hallway,
calling us by name, softly enough,
as if each of us can retain a dignified anonymity
when we rise from our chairs,
relinquish our reading matter,
smooth our wrinkled gowns,
then walk down the sterile corridor
toward rooms housing stone-cold machines
that photograph all the secrets we possess,
magically recording the data of our own machines
that do indeed break down.
We are objects now in an assembly line,
though we wait to be disassembled, really,
handled tenderly enough
by fast-paced nurses, technicians, radiologists
who are always running out of time
as they process dozens of us per hour,
the throngs who need to bank on timing and genes
and the lucky draw,
as in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
except in this scenario it’s the photo image
that either declares us free for another year
or sets forth the stoning.
Visit Imaging Center on Facebook.
Other books by The Puddin’head Press.
View our complete catalog.