Goodbye, Baby
Gaylord Brewer · February 2026
Goodbye, Baby, the author's first book of poetry in six years, is arguably his most personal—a taut and elegiac sequence of grief and loss, but also of lambent memory, of gratitude, of joy, delivered with lightning strikes of Brewer's wry humor amidst his signature brand of darkness. "Goodbye, Baby is an elemental book, a collection of poems that distills chaotic experience down to its most essential ingredients: food, drink, blood, wit, travel, song, love for animals, especially a good dog named Lucy. This is a volume of twelves, of completed circles, of the faces of clocks, an American sort of twelve-line ghazal emerging, each poem an egg contained perfectly within its shell. You will never forget this loved dog and the words she brought forth from one of our finest poets."—Jesse Graves