Demi-octavo, 118 pages, paperback.


$15 including post and packing.

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ISBN 978 1 903090 65 7


(c) John Goodby 2026.

Cover image: John Goodby



Within Young Ames language transforms a personal memory of friendship into a hall of mirrors whose reflections speed on rollercoaster rails criss-crossing points both into a parallel life and an alternating text. Wild and unsentimental, this is real life reimagined into an experience of accelerated poetic exhilaration. A breath-taking read.

—Tim Allen, author of Very Rare Poems Upon The Earth 


The reader is taken giddy over the rim on a vertiginous glissade through the years of an on/off friendship that had its origins in primary school. The eponymous Ames, a (mock) heroic trickster is dazzlingly, darkly amusing. A work as complex and multilayered as the dome of a magpie's nest, achieving simultaneously both structure and disorientation.

—Elisabeth Bletsoe, author of  Birds of the Sherborne Missal  


Young Ames is a blast! ... Taking three fields of content - fragments of autobiography; memories of, and a reunion with, a childhood friend; and Walter D. Edmonds' eponymous New York bildungsroman - Goodby deploys cut-up, fragmentation, divergent-but-somehow-logical-associations, punning and wordplay, and an avant-garde approach ... to render (and take liberties with) a life - or two, or three. It's an outrageously original poem. For all its experimental intent and method, though, Young Ames evokes its characters and periods vividly and with empathy, the expression inoculated against sentimentality by a sensibility alert to the temptations of the cockle-warming cliché and by a reflexive and restlessly associative style that just won't tell it straight.

—Steve Ely, author of  Eely