Good People

Texas Poet Laureate Kevin Prufer's haunting new collection inhabits the uncertain spaces where history, imagination, and conscience refuse easy answers.

In Good People, Kevin Prufer explores the terrain where memory, history, and imagination collide. Across formally inventive poems—lyric sequences, fractured narratives, meditations, and darkly comic monologues—the past becomes unfixed. The dead return, scenes replay with disturbing clarity, and private anxiety becomes inseparable from public catastrophe.

Here, Prufer is fascinated by the minds and motivations of others, often imagined: impostors, angry lovers, drunken writers, a resentful old man, an aesthetic friend speaking from the afterlife—characters of uncertain moral compass who confront political and personal collapse alongside the uneasy comforts of contemporary American life. Again and again, ordinary scenes open onto existential terror, absurdity, and unexpected beauty.

These poems are distinguished by their tonal daring: wit gives way to tenderness; philosophical inquiry slips into performed confession; surreal invention coexists with the everyday. The result is a body of work at once intimate and expansive, haunted by questions of violence, ethics, inheritance, and the burden of memory—real or imagined.

At the heart of Good People lies a difficult question: What can poetry preserve against erasure? These poems resist easy consolation. Instead, they offer something stranger—an unflinching attention to the vagaries of consciousness, the ambiguities of human motivation, and the fragile, occasionally unhinged mind struggling to make meaning as history presses in.