Poetry. "John Godfrey is the ultimate American bard of the prose poem and our Rilke, delivering once-in-a-lifetime epiphanies in job lots. Reading him is hard because you keep hitting sentences whose truths are like heart attacks. You have to pause to make sure you're not dead. 'I love and fail with all my means,' he says. Those means include the soul of the language that lives in all of us and will do anything, seemingly, that its master Godfrey require."—Peter Schjeldahl

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

John Godfrey was born in New York in 1945. He has worked and written in New York's east village for more than three decades. Godfrey's recent books include Private Lemonade (Adventures in Poetry, 2003) and Push the Mule (The Figures, 2001). A graduate of Princeton University and Columbia University's School of Nursing, Godfrey works as a nurse clinician to AIDS patients in New York City. CITY OF CORNERS is his ninth collection.