Daneen Bergland

The Goodbye Kit

Narrative but elliptical, The Goodbye Kit is awash in lyric that thrills as it laments. Themes of transgression and longing infuse these poems about girlhood, marriage, parenthood, aging, and nature. Mapping the charged terrain of human relationship, and marked by a feral sensuality, they explore ecologies of intimacy made tangible through both experience and witness. Their impulse is to capture and project beauty and loss, offering a view of our mutable and tender selves through “wolf-colored glasses,” revealing us as the beautiful, culpable animals we are.

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-1-950404-15-5
Paperback: $18
Publication date: September 2024

Daneen Bergland grew up in the Midwest but found her way home to the Pacific Northwest. She’s been a recipient of a poetry fellowship from Oregon Literary Arts, and her writing has appeared in several journals and books, including Propeller Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, Tahoma Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, and Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest. She teaches at Portland State University. 

Praise for The Goodbye Kit

“We are all so impossible: how could we not love / that we can never touch / the giant tube worms inside their sheaths / gently waving their red plumes in the boiling dark, writes Daneen Bergland, and it’s in the momentary slip at “that”—between loving the fact that we are each so impossible, and loving the impossibility that we can ever really touch—that there is a characteristic crack. Bergland’s poems move mysteriously, often by opposition, toggling between desire for and resistance to the idea of wholeness; between the shape of meaning suggested in story-telling, and the poet’s associative leaps and deadpan landings. At bedrock is loss, felt most keenly in relation to the natural world where, like the earth itself, we are shown to be vivid, strange, and in peril. Listen: The bird outside the window / isn’t really singing, I can tell how taxing it is, / to carve that sound out of silence / with his tiny serrated voice.” —Michele Glazer 

“This poetry is memorable, meaningful, new, and beautiful. Bergland writes of perfection and oddity in tumbling images and shockingly fantastical associations. With wit. With music. There are stretches and risks here, and each works, seeming effortless in its complexity while offering up precise insight. This is truly poetry that reveals the ordinary world, in all its details, to be the strange, scary, miraculous place it is.” —Laura Kasischke

Excerpt from The Goodbye Kit

ANIMALS INVALUABLE TO EPIDEMIOLOGISTS FOR TRACKING THE SPREAD OF DISEASE WILL APPEAR TO US AS ANGELS

These will be among the signs there’s no going back:
A string of disembodied wings at your feet form a path.

Soap operas start going off the air. Words like heretofore
rejoin the lexicon. Bedbugs make an epic comeback.

Suddenly, your taste for meat seems too carnal.
You find this all heartbreaking, so you might make a list

of things you can fit in the palm of a hand: tennis ball, testicle,
tarot deck, tiny bat you can look straight in the teeth.

He’s a little leather pouch of fear. He could be carrying a disease
or a message about the sovereignty of flesh.

Do you think we are the stars of animals’ anxiety dreams?
A body is just a place to keep your guts safe.

You can feel small if that makes you feel better.
The carcasses will still sigh their breath of flies,

the wolves sing the same shivered chord as the trains
as mosquitoes form clouds of lullabies over the plains.

Music has always been good for sad things. Just ask the birds.
If you’ve never been full of eggs, you wouldn’t understand.

SKINNY DIP

whole moon for a halo
she flickers like an insect
shimmering on a switchblade
feels like waiting
for the trickyfish
feels like wishing/ like giving
the middle finger
foot fidgety for the mud suck
in a surface tension necklace
in a cold water dress/ one sinks
and her hair turns to ink
dares the dark to blink and whispers
skinny/ whisks the mirror into glitter
with her shinwings/ flashlit flesh
glinting hint-hint/ limbs insist
the surface part its curtain
which resists