Inventory of Doubts

"Everything is thrillingly alive in Landon Godfrey's Inventory of Doubts: a feather boa dreading the fake blood to come on Halloween, a jealous boulder considering "cures for loneliness while it pauses on a cliff." But far from being exercises in whimsy, the vivid, brief poems collected here have weight: when a dishrag dreams "of the ball gown it will never be" we enter a tale of "experiments with justice"; when a zoo and an apartment building next to it ruminate on one another, we encounter a meditation on liberty. Inventory of Doubts offers us entry into a circus with serious designs. There's a dynamic juxtaposition between the undomesticated figures at play in each poem and the highly structured organization of the book itself: the poems arrive in strict alphabetical order by title, with the last poem, "Zoo", meeting the first poem, "Attic", in a way that ultimately lends the book a circular shape: circus ring indeed! I found Godfrey's often funny, sometimes dark, always surprising anthropomorphic swerves a tonic. Inventory of Doubts is a book where a human is just another kind of animal, and a drinking glass is a deeply feeling creature. Godfrey gifts us an intimate world where "each time a blanket covers a body, it tries to keep the dusty soul alive through the night." -from the Dorset Prize citation by Dana Levin"--