Good Harbor’s poems are mysterious and lucid, penetrating and immediate. In Heinegg’s range of language the splendid achieves clarity, as in “Cajole me in from the porch of shore/ to tiptoe over the daggering shells,// following the sun’s andante/ into the pickling” and the plain achieves many levels of feeling: “When I needed safety, I still had keys// to the house I couldn’t wait to leave.”

 

—Robert Pinsky, United States Poet Laureate (1997-2000), author of At the Foundling Hospital and editor of The Book of Poetry for Hard Times: An Anthology

 

What strikes me most about Good Harbor is how full it is—full of tenderness and wisdom, buoyancy and gravitas. Full of life. In poems packed with enviable lines, Heinegg explores what it is to be, prismatically, one and many: husband, father, son, teacher, friend. I loved this book.

 

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones and Goldenrod

 

Good Harbor is A Portrait of the Artist as a Good Dad—relishing his children and wife and the good harbor of a life. In a book rife with summer delights and the grind of daily existence, Max Heinegg populates his poems with gustatory pleasures and lonely ghosts, teenager-ruled beaches and “gray birds & their young / us[ing] the thin stone ledge to wait out the rain.” Throughout, we feel the precious tenderness of a father’s love, who worries about the precarity of children, like a daughter’s tooth “rock[ing] in her mouth loose enough to see the hinge.” 

 

—Phil Metres, author of Shrapnel Maps and Sand Opera