Overview

Poems that center on the sinister American cryptid, the Goatman of Pope Lick. In her sixth collection Goat-Footed Gods, award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher Kathleen Driskell seeks to rehabilitate the reputation of the infamous Goatman of Pope Lick, identified by The Washington Post as one of the deadliest cryptids in America. The Goatman or Pope Lick Monster, a legendary creature long rumored to roam the woods around Driskell's Kentucky home, is alleged to have caused the deaths of at least five young people at Pope Lick Trestle, a railroad bridge with a ninety-foot drop at its center. The Goatman lyrics are braided with poems about Driskell's child's traumatic injury from a fall. Always at the heart of Driskell's poetry is her insistence that the path to the sacred is found not through the doctrine of ancient gods, but in walking clear-eyed through the dark woods of our historical past and exploring the never-ending wonder of the natural world.

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Reviews

""The world of Kathleen Driskell’s Goat-Footed Gods is a world of liminal spaces. Driskell’s deft lyrics are a reckoning with andness—the violence and beauty of the American South, the gift and harm of ancestry, the mind caught in the past and the one 'frilled with tomorrows.' Achilles drives dead man’s curve; Pan and Dionysus are teenagers in detention. As these poems attest, the membrane between myth and reality—both surreal, complicated, and strange—is thinner than we think. I'll be returning to this collection again and again to be reminded."" * Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful * ""There is magic on hand in Kathleen Driskell's remarkable new collection of poetry. She is tackling huge issues such as history, mythology, parenthood, heartache, and more, yet while her canvas is large, each poem is intimate, haunting, and perfectly constructed. Full of images you will never forget and luxurious language, Goat Footed Gods proves that Kathleen Driskell is one of our best poets."" * Silas House, author of Lark Ascending and Kentucky State Poet Laureate *

""Kathleen Driskell’s poems in Goat-Footed Gods are a lesson in creaturehood, motherhood, and the act of mothering creatures in this world. The voices are many and spatially arranged, capturing events in nature — whether real and local or mythic and imagined. Many poems in the book betray a Keatsian capability in the way they place loss and grief amidst the plenty of life. Others give a sense of freedom, a breaking away from rigid, contractual boundaries drawn by us between truth and myth, myth and reality, love and death, urging the reader to accept and rest in the chaotic order of nature."" * Southern Review of Books * ""The world of Kathleen Driskell’s Goat-Footed Gods is a world of liminal spaces. Driskell’s deft lyrics are a reckoning with andness—the violence and beauty of the American South, the gift and harm of ancestry, the mind caught in the past and the one 'frilled with tomorrows.' Achilles drives dead man’s curve; Pan and Dionysus are teenagers in detention. As these poems attest, the membrane between myth and reality—both surreal, complicated, and strange—is thinner than we think. I'll be returning to this collection again and again to be reminded."" * Maggie Smith, New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful * ""There is magic on hand in Kathleen Driskell's remarkable new collection of poetry. She is tackling huge issues such as history, mythology, parenthood, heartache, and more, yet while her canvas is large, each poem is intimate, haunting, and perfectly constructed. Full of images you will never forget and luxurious language, Goat Footed Gods proves that Kathleen Driskell is one of our best poets."" * Silas House, author of Lark Ascending and Kentucky State Poet Laureate *

Author Information

Award-winning poet, essayist, and teacher, Kathleen Driskell is the author of five collections of poetry. Her poems and essays have been published in The New Yorker, River Teeth, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Appalachian Review, and other literary magazines. She is chair of the Sena Jeter Naslund-Karen Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville.

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