“The best poetry tends to remind us that ‘there’s nothing to get,’ that it is the act of the poem as a hand reaching to hold us that remains its most significant meaning. This is the work of Jenna Goldsmith’s Pineapple Darling, wherein the poet reflects on the search for love and resistance in the American Midwest, demonstrating how to ‘trace / the hidden hazards’ and then ‘surpass them.’ These poems look for and collect kinship, remind us that to love and to resist is the same. Goldsmith takes us by the elbow and teaches us that together we create a consciousness as embodied and sure as the blood in our veins. Hold these lines in your heart, in your mouth, and in your hand, reader—do anything but just sit there.”

—Ryan Clark, author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act

“Jenna Goldsmith’s Pineapple Darling is a modern-day midwestern Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. Whimsical and observant, the speaker is someone you want to have lunch (or brunch) with. Itself an ars poetica, this little book is a walk with the poet that is at once honest and intimate, each poem an artifact, ‘a hard focus like at the scope.’”

—Julia Johnson, author of Subsidence