The Red Goose locates the crux of family life where it actually occurs: at the dinner table after the child has gone to bed, in a test-driven Pontiac smelling of skunk and gasoline, and in the loft a dead father built from whatever lumber was at hand. Wilcox writes with an ear that hears both the music of ordinary speech and the structural creak of aging timber, rendering labor and place without sentimentality and with a craftsman’s respect for form. At its core The Red Goose understands that we crave just "the right set of problems"—marriage, fatherhood, the slow work of keeping a house and a memory from going to seed—and it meets them with warmth, precision, and the durable music of a life attentively lived.The Red Goose moves across ordinary American life — a winter test drive; a daughter dangling above her rain boots; a son clearing the loft his father built — and finds beauty in these moments. These are poems of family, labor, love, and the passage of parents.
Allen Guy Wilcox, Poet and actor.
Debut collection The Red Goose,
Doubly Mad Books, 2026.
“I will read The Red Goose again and again.”
— Jay Parini