23 EXPERIMENTS

by Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough

The enigmatic and adventurous Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough is a rising star in the poetry world, widely admired for his casual complexity and relentless urbanity. His latest concoction, 23 Experiments, is a bold development of his expansive social perspective, a toasty linguistic and visual trek through the poet’s sense of daily experience, troubled as it is by geopolitical menace, positing motion and activity as an antidote to the late commercial slog that swamps authentic poetry and presence.

Goldsborough attacks the page like a violinist her instrument, creating a collagistic landscape of word, meaning, and image—a visual feast animating the psychedelic psychogeography caught in the wind on a bike ride down Broadway. He expresses the poetics of the drift that “sway in Black cosmic perpetuity,” according to Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves. 23 Experiments is a bold dérive replete with buddies and blunts, collaboration and commiseration, dissent and delight. It is a kaleidoscopic, rebellious journey into the heart of the 21st Century.

The format and aesthetic were inspired by issues of Jet magazine from the 1970s, with advertisements and comic panels sharing the road with the poet’s blazing streak of consciousness. Yeukai Zimbwa writes that the poet “composes to facilitate decomposition, setting a place for language, reader in tow, to reimagine itself, to become the space and act of reimagination.” Goldsborough is no horrified witness to history; he is making the moment, fomenting a revolutionary spirit that recalls the raucous psychic research of Bob Kaufman, William S. Burroughs, and Will Alexander.

Praise for 23 Experiments

With astonishing artistry, Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough describes, lyricizes, orchestrates, indicts, celebrates everyday phenomena and transports us into existential wholeness. With a dash of the magical and the transgressive. 23 Experiments is a heartfelt and powerful book.
– Uche Nduka, author of To Umber & Bainbridge Island Notebook

“Another case of lost specifics” says Tilghman, everything parentheticals flowing modifying ad infinitum from the bicycle or from the side. The body thinking spreads out, and inward, the poetics of the flinch is a poetics of breathing through atrocities. T’s loosely infinite kept time, these 23 Experiments missing pages, circling around a moment but avoiding paralysis, slyly, showing us how to keep moving forward. Puns reverberate building—just a porthole u gotta look through—one imagines a “full poem” meaning w/ more staid syntax & grammar but we are, by camera angle, rightly spared that. Red splats accumulate, as do dinners, and parsing a proliferation of symbols ((((}}}}+++ that feel like glyphic shorthand and musical notation and just the right way to connect this thought to that. Zigguratically T expands gradating outwards and shrinks back in, because it is hard to look history in the eye when it refuses to look at you, and when it does, it hurts. So the best defense, i.e. the familiar free fall, the documentation of rhizomatic metamorphic and literal deaths, are in fact a strobing attack on the dulling complacency forced upon our senses.
– Terrence Arjoon, author of The Disinherited

About the Author

Tilghman Alexander Goldsborough (b. richmond, va, usa, april ‘91) lives in Brooklyn and works for the DOE. He is the author of The Western and Object 7 [ ,a subject loosely, ,bundled in a frame,].