JOY BUZZER

ISBN 978-1-938900-58-7
Publication Date: September 2025
Perfect-bound, 76 pages, 9″x7″
Read Press Release (PDF)

SYNOPSIS

With all the manic zeal of a clown show, Henry Goldkamp’s debut collection JOY BUZZER takes a bowie knife (a pillow! a leaf blower! a foam noodle!) to the absurdities of contemporary life, especially those of the poet’s life. Utilizing his invented form of the joy buzzer—named for the practical joke device that delivers a shock when shaking hands—Goldkamp aggravates the distinctions be- tween poet and clown, page and stage, line and punchline, and humor and grief. Goldkamp juggles difficult realities of the current moment—consumerism, climate change, the military industrial complex, a mental health crisis—with the art and artifice of an enter- tainer, even as a frenetic refrain (Hi, I’m Henry) asserts the person beneath the clown paint. Ultimately, this raucous, hilarious, and utterly unique collection leaves the reader feeling like an audience member after the curtain has fallen and the lights have flicked back on: stunned, squinting, and looking at their surroundings with new eyes.

PRAISE  

JOY BUZZER flips off the voltaic artifice of the gag greeting to deliver a page-breaking stand-up elegy to all the readers in the audience. At the speed of fun, virtuoso poet-clown Henry juggles conceptual gags and prop poetry with the punchy poetics of an éclair de loon dancing and pratfalling at the avant-cringe of performance.

—Stine An

Goldkamp’s book-length exercise in “clown poetics” shocks with the sharpness of a mime’s knife, cutting through the pain/pleasure of language and shattering the shiniest mirrors of polite society. Catastrophic, hilarious, and importantly stupid, JOY BUZZER is dangerous fun for the whole family.

— Paul Cunningham

“Clown Poetics”, Henry Goldkamp’s singular and transformative contribution to avant-garde poetry, is fully on display in this debut collection. As Goldkamp’s ‘spectator-distributive’ performances catch fire in city after city, JOY BUZZER is instantly a must-have volume for those interested in either questioning or exploding to smithereens the lectern/sermon method of doing poetry.

—Rodrigo Toscano

AUTHOR

Henry Goldkamp is an interdisciplinary poet who enjoys clowning boundaries of language, visual art, and sensory performance. He lives in New Orleans, where he hosts the monthly poetry series Splice, acts as intermedia editor of TILT for Tilted House, and teaches experimental poetics, and clown studies at Louisiana State University. Recent art, criticism, and performance appear in Annulet, VOLT, Poetry Northwest, Triquarterly, NOIR SAUNA, and Sonora Review, among others. His public art projects have been covered by NPR’s Morning Edition and Time.

DESIGNER

Book design by David Wojciechowski.