York University English Professor David Goldstein will celebrate the launch of his newest poetry collection, Lost Originals (BookThug), with an event on Nov. 15 from 7 to 9pm at Holy Oak Café, 1241 Bloor St. W.
David Goldstein
Starting from the notion that every act of speaking is a translation between worlds, writer, scholar and critic Goldstein’s Lost Originals comprises a collection of elegies for a series of “lost originals” – objects, images and experiences whose ghostly traces can only be evoked through language.
The book’s encounters with a menagerie of items – from porcelain figurines, maps and soundscapes to computer-generated email spam and journalism about sharks – yield a myriad of voices, giving metaphorical speech to the unspeaking or unspoken, and at the same time uncovering a surprising beauty in language normally viewed as impenetrable or utilitarian.
The collection is for lovers of allusive and layered poetics, Flarfist experimentation and language that communes with art, and for those interested in how we encounter objects and how they encounter us.
Goldstein also co-edited two scholarly essay collections published this year, including Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press) with Amy Tigner, and Shakespeare and Hospitality: Ethics, Politics, and Exchange (Routledge) with Julia Reinhard Lupton.
Goldstein is the author of a previous poetry collection, Laws of Rest (BookThug, 2013), a book of criticism, Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge, 2013) and two chapbooks, the most recent of which is Object Permanence (Ugly Duckling, 2015).
He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the Shakespeare’s Globe Book Award.