Released June 30th, 2025 // 84 pages // 978-1-917617-11-6 // RRP: £14.99 / $19.99 / €17.99
Jim Goar’s Iron Lung is a recursive, disorienting interrogation of language, ideology, and the mechanisms of control that shape personal and collective narratives. Drawing from three interwoven sequences, the collection loops through fractured syntax and dense philosophical inquiry, destabilising the reader’s footing at every turn. Goar’s poetry operates like a malfunctioning system—collapsing, reforming, short-circuiting its own logic—rendering a landscape where history, technology, and the self dissolve into recursive feedback loops. Iron Lung is a text that resists easy consumption, demanding instead to be deciphered, dismantled, and inhabited.
PRAISE for Jim Goar:
Goar reifies the interconnectivity of our highly-plastic American iconography--seamlessly integrating cultural touchstones from Ozzie Smith to Richard Nixon to the Immaculate Conception--and in so doing succeeds at an even greater task: Penning a collection of poems brilliantly of and for its time. The Louisiana Purchase is a sterling exemplar of what post-postmodern verse can do in the twenty-first century.
— Seth Abramson, the Huffington Post
If one were to fall asleep some afternoon having just learned that John Steinbeck published The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights (an adaptation of Malory) as well as The Grapes of Wrath, and then dream a braided dream of Okies pursuing the Holy Grail, and were Godard then to edit that dream, one would have something a little like this book’s title poem.
— Paul Scott Stanfield, Ploughshares Blog
Jim Goar’s third full-length collection The Dustbowl is compelling evidence that the legacy of the New American Poetry is alive and well. The centerpiece of Goar’s rich and strange new book is the title poem, a 55-page serial work, which is reminiscent of the long poems of Jack Spicer and Ed Dorn.
— Michael Leong, Big Other
Goar’s unexpected combinations make the reader see the beauty in the absurd.
— Spencer Hendrixson, the Rumpus
You should read this book. It’s not the American story you learned about in third grade. It’s the one you wanted to learn. It’s the one that was always the true story.
— Dorothea Lasky
Goar echoes Edson's vintage id-twisting logic as he populates his Texas-Iowa-Disneyland with a menagerie of trespassers, including a genitalia-nesting bird, an elephant who lives under his house, a pianist with an itchy trigger finger, and a horse that is more Che Guevera than Mr. Ed. His clause-free declarative sentences are a perfect match for the edgy grade-school surrealism which guides us into emotional revelation.
— Scott Glassman, Rain Taxi Online
Jim Goar’s book is squarely in the American grain. A radical re-imagining of the mythos in the tradition of Williams, Dorn, and Spicer (not to mention Max Jacob and Alejandro Jodorowsky), The Louisiana Purchase is a rich pageant of Americana.
— Jeff Hilson
Goar’s ability to forge emotional connections between disparate characters and concepts is exceptional.
— Nate Friedman, CutBank Blog
The Louisiana Purchase signals a renewed project in poetry: to seek, perchance to find what is holy, and if not, make it so. This book is an instrument for being.
— Loren Goodman
It’s the ambition of this book that really sets it apart from much recent poetry. It’s tradition and life and learning shot through with the quirks of the individual.
— Nikolai Duffy, the Literateur
The landscape of the Purchase is at once thrilling, dangerous, and oddly comforting, like a nonsensical dream that feels profound, and where any misstep could have drastic repercussions.
— Shannon Wagner, Ploughshares Blog
The poems in Jim Goar's book were written in Seoul, South Korea over a few years, and all of them flow into one another, largely without punctuation or individual titles, to form what is as a whole a glorious example of sparse language and observations.
— John Gimblett, Stride Magazine
Goar’s brilliant portrait of life in a foreign city is made of such moments that melt and evaporate into others. It is an atmosphere we breathe, condensation on the windowpanes that we look through, rain we hear on the pavements outside. It is a perfect evocation of the misty ways in which we live and remember living.
— Anne McDermott, the Literateur
ABOUT Jim Goar:
Jim Goar is the author of The Dustbowl (Shearsman), The Louisiana Purchase (Rose Metal Press), and Seoul Bus Poems (Reality Street). His recent work can be found in Criticism, Modern Language Studies, English, New Writing, College Literature and ELH. He is an associate professor of English at Elizabeth City State University.
