the needle

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Cover and book design by Brandon Saloy

“The poems in Regan Good’s The Needle find their home deep in the Northeast Corridor’s scum, rot, and decay—the source, ultimately, of regeneration.  Born into a world where “it was ever Easter in our yard,” the poet avers “I was ever thinking backwards toward the other way.” Poem by poem, The Needle charts the directions of that other way, where “One writes towards the worm, the white welter, / the purity of the hole.” Good is Cailleach returned, just when we’d thought we’d lost her forever.”

— Claudia Keelan

“The poems of The Needle are textured, muscular, and driven by the idea that the natural world is the last parcel of moral ground we have. Endlessly surprising and deliberate, they show us how what we’ve lost may yet be recovered.”  

—Sean Singer

“The poems in The Needle come barreling out of time in an utterly original and necessary way: ‘One could live a thousand years ago, or two. Or ten.’ They inhabit a landscape that is recognizably our own but at the same time is ancient, hungry, and burning with celestial fire. A poem might originate on the Gowanus or a basement in Connecticut, but it stretches much, much farther—from childhood’s savage innocence to myths that sit deep and long in the world we can feel around us. They are weird in the vital, true, old meaning of the word: spells and charms that open us to something like fate if we attend to them. And how could we fail to? The music here impels us. With echoes of Yeats and Stevens, it's both intoxicating and grounded in the stuff of the earth. The Needle is extraordinary.”

—Tom Thompson

“The Needle takes aspects of what gets called ‘naturalism’ and pieces together portions of the world, or rather, worlds, and holds them together with a glue of vital, unlikely association.  Good’s voice deserves our attention, unless we’ve stopped looking for the worthwhile.”  

—Carl Martin

A German broadsheet printed in Nuremberg in 1561, describes a mass sighting of avian objects witnessed on the morning of April 14. Townspeople observed hundreds of spheres, cylinders and other odd-shaped objects moving erratically overhead, and claimed the battle ceased only when a large black triangular object appeared in the sky, followed by a loud crash outside of the city. Some believe this event was simply the appearance of sundogs.