Raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana, Kevin Goodan began working for the U.S. Forest Service at a young age, and attended the Universities of Montana and Massachusetts. He has lived in Northern Ireland, and lectured at universities on terrorism. His poems have been published in Ploughshares and other journals. Currently, he resides on a small farm in Western Massachusetts.

“[Spot Weather Forecast] brings the reader into the heart of the fire, creating a viscerally searing experience for anyone who, like all of us in the western part of the country, live with, think about, fear, or otherwise have feelings about the wildfires that worsen every year.”
—The Seattle Times

“Goodan (Anaphora) writes viscerally of his experience working as a firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service in commanding language that evokes disaster and destruction. … Goodan takes the reader to hell and back in this electrifying collection.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“If Carpe diem translates to “seize the day,” then one must instead attribute Kevin Goodan’s Spot Weather Forecast more appropriately to Carpe omnia, or “seize everything.”
—Kimberly Burwick, Orion.

'“Robinson Jeffers, Carl Sandburg, Anne Sexton, Rodney Jones, Pattiann Rogers, all have written eloquently about fire but in Spot Weather Forecast each poem wields the authenticity of an incident report. In Kevin Goodan’s skilled hands, wildfire and poetry are both ‘a function of light,/a cursive that whispers our names/to the overstory.’ It is a delight to bask in the poet’s apt language which pulses and radiates like cinders after a firestorm. He is in awe of fire’s destruction (what he calls ‘thy roiling baptism’), in awe of the cyclical life or death struggle, in awe of the defiant brave he works among. This book is not just for firefighters and pyros; it is a must-read for anyone trying to better understand the glorious or gruesome moods of Nature.”
—Allen Braden

“Surely a descendant of Gerard Manley Hopkins, that fire god of poetry, Kevin Goodan writes with such a velocity of song and mind that the reader enters the ‘sanctity of risk/ The taste of it/ Hallelujah’ that firefighters know in full. They learn from flame: threat and intensity and nature teaching them what can only be known when one’s body is between the fire and those it could kill. ‘We have much to teach you,/ Little brother,’ say the flames. These poems, this fire liturgy, is what Goodan brought back from the burning forests, forests that speak, fire that can purge us ‘into songlets of ash.’ These poems are primeval, and surely authored by Kevin Goodan and I-know-not-what.”
—Katie Ford

“There is no escaping ‘the language of incineration’ or the ‘ash-dark art’ Kevin Goodan so brilliantly writes. To read these poems is to feel the pop and torque of wildland firefighting and to breathe its searing air while kneeling at the altar of fate and flame. It is to feel simultaneously engulfed and skewered by the paradoxes at the heart of our own fiery existence. This is an epic collection by one who has literally given his lungs to the flames and has managed to combine a Hopkinsian lyricism with a visionary imagination in the tradition of Cormac McCarthy.”
—Derek Sheffield, author of Through the Second Skin