Winner of the 2010 FIELD Poetry PrizeTimothy O'Keefe's inaugural full-length collection, The Goodbye Town is a complex and multilayered work, deeply intelligent and humane, beautifully balanced in its sly wit and elegant lyricism. O'Keefe has a fresh and distinctive voice, a dazzling command of language."Sherwood Anderson said, 'I once wrote a poem about a strange land few of us ever enter. I called it the land of the Now.' Timothy O'Keefe has established a municipality inside the Now and named it The Goodbye Town. In this town, the past is a... well... a thing of the past. 'The trouble with memory,' writes O'Keefe, 'is it's always today.' The forms that bind us to the past are broken, epiphany is despised, and photos rearrange themselves to match the mood of the present. O'Keefe's poems are not Time, but another thing that flies--grace, soul, fleeting love, the furious imagination of a poet so attendant to his art as to be contemporary without simply resorting to novelty." -- D. A. Powell "Timothy O'Keefe is a poet attuned to the intricacies of poetic form and nuances of inhabited space. 'Trajectory is retrospective & still / there are these hills. / Tree-bleed, lateral light, further & further....' In poems of compelling velocity, The Goodbye Town traces the permeable boundaries of a place shaped by voices existing both outside and inside the margins. O'Keefe's ambitious first book shows us that a town can be a text from which we can never untangle ourselves." -- Susan Howe