Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collections Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography (2022) and Folklore of Lunenburg County (2024), both published by Gaspereau Press, and he is currently working on a third collection. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, Grain, and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia. Follow him on Instagram or contact him here.
The poems in Folklore of Lunenburg County are rooted in the ethnography of Helen Creighton and the otherworldly stories of supernatural encounters that she collected on the south shore of Nova Scotia in the mid-twentieth century. For Goodfellow, these accounts evoke much more than quaint records of a primitive time and place. Ghost stories become a lens on human relationships; supernatural experiences become analogs for loss, longing, and disappearance, and for the way in which these experiences are mediated by landscape, nature, and community ritual.— from the publisher // buy now→
In Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography, Goodfellow’s spare style and sensitivity to the way people, objects and places fuse together through time give these poems the surefootedness of a thing rooted in the earth.— from the publisher // buy now→
[A] poetry of intense scrutiny at the natural world & at the smallest pieces and tools with which we make & navigate our temporary, mortal spaces in that world. The method is most often fragment yearning toward sentence-hood, the effect is a palpable imperative toward a completeness that never quite erases the brokenness (“a bruise gone dark”) we all carry variously inside us.— Carl Phillips/Instagram
[Poems] that almost always return to frost and soil.— Literary Review of Canada
Unusual beauty.— Elana Wolff, The New Quarterly
Darkly mesmerizing.— Robert Nazarene, The American Journal of Poetry
Liminal, sensual, macabre.— Jade Wallace, Carousel Magazine
Otherworldly.— Janet Barkhouse, Coastal Villages
[A] descriptive layering of landscape across the connective tissue of his self-described small waterfront acre, rippling slowly out from that central, singular focal point of roots, observation and interaction.— Rob McLennan