BINGE WATCH by Kati Goldstein

Kati Goldstein‘s Binge Watch is full of whip-smart poems about seeing and being seen.  While certain poems reveal the speaker’s experience of being photographed, as a girl, by her step-father through her bedroom window, other poems reflect our culture’s collective acts of watching–The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, The Bachelor, Toddlers & Tiaras.  Seeing can be a form of consumption, the unconscious binge, but the poems themselves are also acts of seeing, exuberant, redemptive acts.  “I literally copy & pasted the whole world,” one poem declares. Goldstein’s language is charged, electric, alive. This poet’s buoyant spirit cannot be dampened.  Ultimately the collection invites the reader to look hard enough to partake of “the healing of being awake.”

–Jane Hilberry, author of Still the Animals Enter

In Kati Goldstein‘s poems, everyone is watching everyone else.  Petty, narcissistic housewives are watched by millions on TV.  Teenage girls are watched (and photographed) by stepfathers through bedroom windows.  Are we all voyeurs?  All exhibitionists?  Can life be lived, or merely exploited—for the gaze of others?  Goldstein offers no easy answers to the questions these poems pose.  But she does accept responsibility for her gaze, and would ask us to do the same.

–David Trinidad, author of Notes on a Past Life

How does a collection that includes a poem titled “After Discovering that My Stepfather has been Photographing Me from Outside My Bedroom Window” contain so much exuberance, so much fragmented joy? This book’s honest glee, its quirky erotics, its insistent incorruptibility, is powerhouse—its elations steamroll betrayers, creeps, and pedophiles. “Grow young again, fountain girl,” Goldstein writes, and here, young does not mean naïve, but unbridled. “OMG is the Moon OK?!” one of her titles asks. The answer is yes, in Kati Goldstein‘s hands, the moon is OK as hell, and so is poetry.

–Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl