The Red Goose
Allen Guy Wilcox
2026
“...vividly imagistic, and wonderfully varied.”
Praise for The Red Goose:
"Like his antecedent, Hayden Carruth, Allen Guy Wilcox writes poems rooted in upstate New York and Vermont, in the spaces of a rural America that are in-between. These are spaces of loss and beauty and nostalgia. The Red Goose moves across ordinary American life — a winter test drive through Almond, New York; a daughter counting 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. They are sad and lovely."
- Pauls Toutonghi
Author of THE REFUGEE OCEAN
"I've been reading the deft, alluring poems of Allen Guy Wilcox for many years, and it’s a pleasure to have the very best of them gathered in this sumptuous first collection. Wilcox is a poet of immense gifts: his ear is keen, and he is alert to the reverberations of language, the way sounds call to sounds, attentive to the music of everyday life. Each of his poems carries a tune, and the sequence as a whole is granular, vividly imagistic, and wonderfully varied. He summons a largely rural world that, for me, is deeply appealing. I will read The Red Goose again and again.”
- Jay Parini
Author of NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS: 1975-2015
Thank you to everyone who ordered during the pre-sale period! All orders will ship after the book release in mid-July. The Red Goose will be available for purchase by July 13, 2026.
At the Dinner Table at Night
You’ve gone to bed with the baby again, as I step
gingerly through the house, searching for quiet projects
I can take to completion and leave for you like origami.
Each room for you to wake in as you wander,
brewing a gift like morning coffee, the raw ends
of your several lists now seared and cooling.
It’s much nicer when we can sit here
as a family a few moments longer, while our girl
begins to improvise tomorrow aloud, ticking off
her list of necessaries, countermanding the plot
with reasonable justifications which she has collected
from the pond like pretty rocks. To sit here,
with large glasses of water in front of us,
and a bowl of dressed cabbage now resting.
To age and grow together this way, to keep
unfeigned the family hug she often calls for;
the marriage and the patterns of work and rising,
not to let them go to seed; to allow ourselves
to achieve our own narrative, to board the right train,
see there are still seats for us, to watch the rifling
landscape harmonize, on this one route, headed
towards the very spot on the map we had agreed on.
How right it would feel to maintain the memory of being
at the dinner table at night, and, before bath and bedtime,
to have thrown a last jacket back on—it being a clear night,
after all—and to step out onto the driveway, caps on our heads,
holding hands or not, but together, and just look up.
You’ve gone to bed with the baby again, as I step
gingerly through the house, searching for quiet projects
I can take to completion and leave for you like origami.
Each room for you to wake in as you wander,
brewing a gift like morning coffee, the raw ends
of your several lists now seared and cooling.
It’s much nicer when we can sit here
as a family a few moments longer, while our girl
begins to improvise tomorrow aloud, ticking off
her list of necessaries, countermanding the plot
with reasonable justifications which she has collected
from the pond like pretty rocks. To sit here,
with large glasses of water in front of us,
and a bowl of dressed cabbage now resting.
To age and grow together this way, to keep
unfeigned the family hug she often calls for;
the marriage and the patterns of work and rising,
not to let them go to seed; to allow ourselves
to achieve our own narrative, to board the right train,
see there are still seats for us, to watch the rifling
landscape harmonize, on this one route, headed
towards the very spot on the map we had agreed on.
How right it would feel to maintain the memory of being
at the dinner table at night, and, before bath and bedtime,
to have thrown a last jacket back on—it being a clear night,
after all—and to step out onto the driveway, caps on our heads,
holding hands or not, but together, and just look up.
The Red Goose
It was morning—the night wind having shivered down the buckthorn—
when breaking the seal of the garage door I looked across the frosted yard.
Even tears shook from my eyes—I swear it was the cold.
The bare shanks of untreated wood starting to crack in the half-built greenhouse.
When there she stood, her noggin sprung like a convenience store lighter
the boys wire up into flash-bangs—the red goose,
traipsing, sputtering in the frosted green-gold yard.
My daughter yelling at me from the upstairs window to go away
and her mother saying she’s tired, she’s tired is all—
go away daddy. Already I’m in another world as I cross the yard,
the snow lifting off the polycarb like an old starlet—the whimsical granny click-heels.
Whereas for daddy, certain complaints only are registered, when intoned—
the thinking has to be thought through the lengths of itching limbs in an afternoon.
So if the pint-getting, spare-hour boys are pulled away by wives and late work,
there’s a lot of whistling—the poor goose darted—into the corners of the mind,
mind constructed of two by fours, twenty four inches on the center,
since we learned in the slim years to economize where we can.
It was morning—the night wind having shivered down the buckthorn—
when breaking the seal of the garage door I looked across the frosted yard.
Even tears shook from my eyes—I swear it was the cold.
The bare shanks of untreated wood starting to crack in the half-built greenhouse.
When there she stood, her noggin sprung like a convenience store lighter
the boys wire up into flash-bangs—the red goose,
traipsing, sputtering in the frosted green-gold yard.
My daughter yelling at me from the upstairs window to go away
and her mother saying she’s tired, she’s tired is all—
go away daddy. Already I’m in another world as I cross the yard,
the snow lifting off the polycarb like an old starlet—the whimsical granny click-heels.
Whereas for daddy, certain complaints only are registered, when intoned—
the thinking has to be thought through the lengths of itching limbs in an afternoon.
So if the pint-getting, spare-hour boys are pulled away by wives and late work,
there’s a lot of whistling—the poor goose darted—into the corners of the mind,
mind constructed of two by fours, twenty four inches on the center,
since we learned in the slim years to economize where we can.
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