1In poem after poem, the pages of Crybaby Bridge present a series of tiny revelations, like in "Spontaneous Generation" "I got alive / the same as you: / salt made // a small
reckoning." It's all so simple, so right there--but poet Kathy Goodkin's sweeping floodlights allow us to see it. In this book, Goodkin observes an ordinary world with its small tragedies and workaday beauties--forests and fields that give way to housing developments, balloons blooming outside a party store, cars winched from rivers--and she gives it to readers straight. Goodkin's several poems titled "Sleep Paralysis" offer a helpful lens for understanding the pictures each poem presents. When you can't look away, you get a chance to take it all in, the reservoir, the larkspur, the slow and insistent layered growth of a city.