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  WINNER OF THE 2018 HALCYON AWARD FOR POETRY

Secondary Cicatrices was also an Award-Winning Finalist in the Poetry category of the 2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest, a 2020 Human Relations Indie Book Award Gold Winner, and a 2020 Finalist in the International Book Awards, a 2021 Finalist in the Book Excellence Awards, a Distinguished Favorite in the 2021 Independent Press Awards, and also garnered a "Distinguished Favorite" in the poetry category of the NYC Big Book Awards. 

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Love betrayed. Lives wrecked. Silence at water’s edge. How does one dissect catastrophe and make peace with it? Lynne Goldsmith searches for answers in this brave, painstakingly rendered collection, which depicts in unflinching detail, the silence and longing of lives that know no poetry. Do bare landscapes listen? Goldsmith asks. Despite all, she finds resilience and an answer: Yes.

 

           —Robert Leonard Reid, author of Because It is So Beautiful: Unraveling the
               Mystique of the American West, a finalist for the 2018 PEN/Diamonstein-

               Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.

 

 

 

The engaging poems in Secondary Cicatrices span vast caverns of emotion, from delectable nature poems, to elemental love poems, to brutal poems about all-consuming addiction, the violence of war, and the abuse of animals.  In “Waterful,” Goldsmith carries the reader into the center of a river, where the speaker loses herself in rushing water, blissfully remarking “I am no one here” and “Overflow is everywhere.”  And deliciously, in “Snapdragon,” the flower speaks of the honeybee’s

               hairy body tip[ping] my petals over
               every time until he finds my coolest nectar. 

 

These nurturing moments sustain us when we have to face the book’s unsettling explorations of human experience, like the flashbacks of war in “Splitting Wood” and the speaker’s uncomfortable acknowledgement that

 

               there’d been some senseless pleasure

               in having been caught in a moment

               ruled by a mob, a force  

 

Goldsmith’s eye is unflinching and compassionate, finding humanity alike in speakers immersed in the joy of the natural world and those who, in the desperation of drug addiction, commit acts of unforgivable cruelty.

 

      —Ann Tweedy, author of The Body's Alphabet (Headmistress Press, 2016)
          and White Out (Green Fuse Poetic Arts Association, 2013), Beleaguered Oases   
          (tcCreativePress, 2010).

 

 

 

About The Author

Lynne Goldsmith is the winner of the 2018 Halcyon Award. She lives in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  She holds three graduate degrees in teaching, counseling, and English and has also been a triple-licensed therapist and National Certified Counselor. In addition to writing poetry, she also enjoys writing in other genres. Secondary Cicatrices was an Award-Winning Finalist in the Poetry category of the 2019 Best Book Awards sponsored by American Book Fest.