Across dozens of performances, variety acts, and pratfalls, Henry Goldkamp's Balloon Animal lures us into a festival of flailing wonder. Staged by a cast of irreverent characters, clowns and poets, politicks and scuzzery, Balloon Animal is at turns sad, farcical, biting, and honest. Goldkamp trips over the tightrope between genuine and cringe, bounces, and catches himself again in bouts of virtuosic vertigo. Balloon Animal's prop-poetics will have you sweating bullets, knives, and whatever other slapsticks are stuck in your circus tent of a head.

Balloon Animal is a spectacle, an absurd trick of performance, plastic language with life breathed into it, twisted in the deft hands of Henry Goldkamp to become something that mad-dashes about the page, floating and diving and leaping, always at risk of exploding but letting us revel in the thrill of wondering if and when it will. These poems whistle and go silent and pop. They have props and characters and costumes. It’s hard to imagine them performed aloud but within these pages we are offered the distinct pleasure of trying to imagine how performance-poet-­extraordinaire Henry Goldkamp might. And indeed, his clown-host-speaker-­ventriloquist does make anything—from collapse of nation, to undermining the universe’s dictate to shop, to reading a poem while eating a tunafish sandwich—seem impossibly possible.

—Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo

What I love most about Henry Goldkamp’s work is the way it hovers around the boundary between anxiety and humor, where it’s hard to tell if what we’re seeing/experiencing/engaging in is funny or… very, very scary (because it’s the void, the darkness which surrounds us from the very famous poem). There is the discomfort of wondering why we’ve all been gathered here: the audience, the performers, the writer hiding somewhere in plain sight. Are we meant to learn something, to forget something, where am I supposed to look? What is it that we wanted and what does it mean to have wanted it. And now the clown is laughing at us, and we feel that he’s right to. But then he takes out some outrageous prop, a horse, a giant pencil (out of sympathy? for our sake?) so we can stop thinking about ourselves for once.

—Courtney Bush

Crucial to Henry Goldkamp’s work is a relentless assault on poetic sentimentality, decorum, good manners, so-called “empathy,” doing things the right way. But despite the chaos, instability, and cruelty of its form and content, and despite the oft-seeming hostility of its position against the reader and audience, at its core Balloon Animal is social, communal, and hopeful. Goldkamp rightfully questions the technology of the lyric, whether it has retained any usefulness in the present form that we have inherited. All normative conceptions of scale are destroyed, jettisoned, thrown from the window—but these experimental blow-outs ultimately serve to dismantle capitalist power systems, and construct something new in the rainbow-colored ashes left behind. Profanely sacred, wondrously vile, terrifyingly joyful: This poetry cares about us.

—Alex Tretbar