Description
Zach Goldberg’s I’d Rather Be Destroyed carves straight to the core of self-destruction, reckoning with personal, familial, and sociocultural struggles.
Earnest and darkly funny, this collection rebuilds the self from its broken pieces. Playing with dynamic and experimental forms, Goldberg explores modern Jewish identity, familial and cultural inheritances, and managing mental health. Its historical and religious allusions navigate modern and personal conversations, reflecting how we embrace and reject the legacies that shape us.
Sharp and captivating, I’d Rather Be Destroyed’s honesty and artistry make it a must-read.
Winner of the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest
Awards
WINNER of the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest
Praise for Zach Goldberg
Zach Goldberg writes like an inventor, making the page his play ground. I’d Rather Be Destroyed is as brilliant as it is easeful. Each page is a home we are invited into. Each line is a table we sit down at, grateful.
—Andrea Gibson, You Better Be Lightning
Dexterous and innovative, Goldberg’s poems traverse between intimate struggles to geopolitical conflicts. Moving from aching present to past and back again, these poems reach towards the possibility of healing, inviting us to reach for “Home, the place you leave / to find.” A beautiful debut!
—Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach, 40 Weeks
I’d Rather Be Destroyed is an intricate map shepherding its reader into possibilities of home. Goldberg shows us that diaspora can be a nesting doll of ghosts, that correlations and revelations share a piercing proximity; a split-atom I understand more through its blaze.
—Junious ‘Jay’ Ward, Composition
About Zach Goldberg
Zach Goldberg is a writer, educator, and arts administrator from Durham, NC. He is the author of XV (Nomadic Press, 2020) and the winner of the 2021 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest. A former member of the 2018 and… MORE