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. His poems have appeared in the Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, CV2, Prairie Fire and elsewhere, and his writing is supported by grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. He lives in Nova Scotia.
Folklore of Lunenburg County
Gaspereau Press, 2024, forthcoming
Folklore of Lunenburg County uses Helen Creighton’s mid-century ethnography of fragmented beliefs about the supernatural on the south shore of Nova Scotia as a departure point on the way to something more hidden, exploring the way her subjects’ experience of the supernatural was an analog for loss, longing and disappearance, and how it was mediated in relation to landscape, nature, and ritual—reimagining human relationships, romantic and otherwise, through the lens of the ghost story.
The development of the collection was supported by a Research & Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and poems from the book have appeared in Matter, Grain, Riddle Fence, The Windsor Review, Modron, and elsewhere.
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Naturalism, An Annotated Bibliography
Gaspereau Press, 2022
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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
[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