With Ryan Gosling's childhood and his various acting roles as a focal point, Dawn Tefft plunges into the machinery of spectacle culture and surfaces with a beautiful critique of the falsehood of a fixed self, particularly as it expands and contracts under the pressure of consuming and being consumed. The persona poems Tefft deftly sequences might be read as Gosling's multiple selves, which conspire to blur the line between the real and the performed real and arrive at a more accurate, more pluralized sense of gender, class and personhood. Few writers have the courage and the craft to balance shrewd observation with profound empathy toward their subject matter, but that's exactly what permeates these poems and what webs them together so brilliantly. —Paul Martinez Pompa, author of My Kill Adore Him

Gosling masterfully defamiliarizes the world of pop culture and its money, violence, scarcity, and beauty, while “complexity hums through everything.” Whether you confuse your celebrity Ryans or have a favorite one, or a “gosling” is to you simply a fledgling goose or a young, naïve human, reading this volume will deposit new sediment of meaning in your brain.   — Snežana Žabić, author of The Breath Capital