Poetry. "This often funny but more often melancholic volume displays Goldstein's major obsessions—Los Angeles, Judaism and poetry. His L.A. is that of the 1950s, when 'War babies came in all colors,' and 'Hollywood lies where seedy traffic / found and fostered it,' a tawdry scene populated by the ghosts of Orson Welles and Raymond Chandler and such broken souls as the subject of the 'Girl at a School for the Emotionally Disturbed.' Having grown up in an L.A. that 'had its little Israels; / we lived in one, before it changed color,' Goldstein deftly explores his estrangement from the city's non-Jewish life, 'the protocols outside my heritage, / half-secret like the sin of assimilation.' His best poems join common language to ancient rhythms—as he explains, 'I have in mind a runic mode less fixated, / neither mourning a picture nor enraged by recollection, nor bound by visual cues.' Ultimately, Goldstein finds solace from his geographic, religious and artistic tribulations in the comfort of companionship: 'Friendships are so much like poems, / brief affinities, chance and happy / conjunctions no one can adequately explain.'"—Publishers Weekly