Characters

poems by

Becky Gould Gibson

~76 pages, $15 (+ shipping)

Projected Release Date: September/October 2026

An Advance Sale Discount price of $9 (+ shipping) is available HERE prior to press time. This price is not available anywhere else or by check. The check price is $13.50/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412. 

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Becky Gould Gibson grew up in rural upstate South Carolina, earned a B.A. in English from Converse College (1967) and a Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill (1977). She then moved to Winston-Salem, where she picked up teaching gigs while raising two young children. In 1988, she landed full-time at Guilford College. Her prize-winning poetry appears in eight collections: Off-Road Meditations (NC Writers’ Network, 1989); Holding Ground (White Eagle Coffee Store Press, 1996); First Life (Emrys Press, 1997); Need-Fire (Bright Hill Press, 2007); Aphrodite’s Daughter (Texas Review Press, 2007); Heading Home (Main Street Rag, 2014); The Xanthippe Fragments (St. Andrews University Press, 2016); and Indelible (Broadkill River Press, 2018). She lives with her husband in Chapel Hill.

Comparisons between Becky Gould Gibson’s splendid new volume of poems, Characters, and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology are perhaps inevitable. They are both unforgettable, though Gibson’s roster of “characters” is not only remarkably imaginative, and wildly expansive, but also brilliantly animated by her forensic attention to detail and chiseled diction. Her finesse and range with structure is peerless: true rhyme, slant rhyme, the often-iambic, intoxicating crossfire of aural inventiveness that exerts exquisite pressure on her inimitable language. A riveting book by a riveting poet. ~Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) & author of Steady Daylight

Becky Gould Gibson’s Characters is a glorious compendium of characters: living and dead—some long dead—human, animal, and plant. With characteristic precision and wit, scholarly yet playful, a sensuous classicist, Gibson offers up a motley, “her brain, / labyrinth of mismatched notions.” (“Kavala, Greece, May 2011”). The book concludes with a visit to Italy by a long-married couple who, surrounded by a cast evoked from the ancient world, themselves become characters. ~Joan Barasovska

Forget jaded images and bow-tied endings, Becky Gould Gibson owns the unexpected, writes with empathy and piercing truth about a roach, a garden box, Renoir, a grandmother’s “sin-seeking” hats. A couple gets lost searching for the Via Appia; a father becomes weightless as a milkweed seed. Hera recommends sexting to a “gulled wife.” Characters brims with love and loss and Italian light, with curiosity, humor, and an intense desire to “trick fate…out of one more day.” ~Pam Baggett

The Supernumerary

He fell into the role so easily
you would think he’d rehearsed his whole life.
When the opera put out the call,
he was the height and build they wanted.
He filled the coat.
Maybe he’d always been an extra,
everywhere he went.
His mother, busy, distracted, often forgot
to call him to dinner, so he stayed
in his room counting baseball cards
or playing with his toy magnet.
His teacher reading from the roll book
overlooked him,
his name slipping between the lines—
Jones, Smith, Williams—
he could be anyone.
Or he sat in the corner near the door,
always wearing khaki, never yellow or orange,
so even when he raised his hand,
his teacher missed him.

The story could go on cruelly:
the fraternity that rushed him, didn’t call back,
Who? they puzzled among themselves,
the name maybe, but not the face;
or the girl he thought he’d asked out
who never showed up;
the job he took at last—paychecks lost,
addressee unknown, return to sender;
even the woman he married who’d expected
someone else at the altar,
someone charming, self-assured,
a man her imagination could grab hold of,
the lead, center stage.
But it was him all right, what he’d been all along.

So, when he got the part,
he knew how to play it.
By now it was a costume, a role to fill.
When he put on that bright blue wool,
red braid and big brass buttons,
he had never felt so confident.
The chance of a lifetime. To finally be himself
and feel good about it. He never sang
or spoke lines, rather stood in back woodenly
holding a tray full of beer mugs.
He was a triumph, everyone said so.
Though only an extra, a supernumerary,
he counted,
there in the lights with the others, his eyes shining,
his face paint thick as any diva’s.

A Daughter’s Villanelle

For poetry makes nothing happen. . .
~W. H. Auden

This trifling scheme, these little skips of rhyme
are all you know to do. Ream out your brain
while what she’s going through should strike you dumb.

Yet on you patter in this foolish form
French peasants danced to. Each breath’s a refrain
of its own, needs no trifling scheme or rhyme.

Nor does she sing, but that she sings to him,
he then takes up the burden of her strain.
What they are singing, though, would strike you dumb

if you could hear it. In this sunny room
you’d think them young, with nothing to complain
of, nothing to be turned to scheme or rhyme.

Tune your own lyre. Your song is not for them,
nor should it be. The theme they strum again
with expert fingers only makes you dumb.

She is your mother, hers the mother-womb
all your words come from, yet no words explain
what she is going through. It’d strike you dumb.
What’s left you now to do but scheme and rhyme?

Kavala, Greece, May 2011

Would Agrippina have bought it? He’s talking of Lydia’s purple.
This evening they’d meant to try someplace different,
came here anyway, same waiter who’d recommended
arrogants, a humble fish grilled lightly. Saint Paul.
Saint Lydia. Both entrepreneurs of a sort—were they not?
Why all the questions? After a day in the dust
of Philippi’s ruins, she’s thinking only of dinner—she,
more sensualist than scholar. One olive from Thasos sets her off.

But he won’t let go of her, wishes to enter the folds of her brain,
labyrinth of mismatched notions. Had they been
a first-century couple, he’d lose himself in the
folds of her stola. He wants all of her. Takes it.
Yet leaves her intact. Intacta. Herself. His thoroughly.
Earlier he’d picked her up at the site as promised,
left a basket of strawberries on the bedside table.
Now he reads aloud from The International Herald Tribune.

Laughter evolved a million years ago, apparently, before vowels
and consonants. To build cooperation. Sparrow.
The black and white suited magpie. Pikka pikka.
Vowels, consonants, maybe laughter. She asks,
Do the birds here speak Greek or Latin? Corvus corone.
Black hooded crow they saw in Rome laughs
outside their window. Swallow. Hirundo rustica,
hirundo daurica. He says come to bed now, she closes her bird book.