Jean Valentine has characterized Beckian Fritz Goldberg’s work as a “fierce homage to the body and to the spirit.” Landscape may have influenced the intensity of this homage; Goldberg grew up in the harsh Arizona desert, where she currently resides.
“Death is the eternal problem,” Goldberg says. “I can’t write without that awareness—to me it’s constant…. How can you love something and not mourn the fact that it’s going to disappear?” Even when not overtly dealing with death, Goldberg’s work concerns itself with the mortality of humans and the natural environments that shape them.
Goldberg is the author of The Book of Accident and Lie Awake Lake and Egypt from Space—a collection of prose poems— among many others since in the early Nineties. She has been awarded the Theodore Roethke Poetry Prize, The Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Award, The University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and her work has also been anthologized in The Best American Poetry series. Goldberg holds an MFA from Vermont College and an MA from Arizona State University, where she was mentored by Norman Dubie. Presently, she directs the Creative Writing Program at Arizona State University.
Willow Springs interviewed her over lunch at Europa Restaurant in Spokane, Washington.
