Brad Richard

Turned Earth, the fifth collection of poems by Brad Richard, offers a portrait of the artist as a grieving son who is also a husband, teacher, gardener, and attentive witness to our precarious world. Navigating life after his mother's death, the speaker uses memory and imagination to understand, as one poem's title declares, "How I Came to This." Tender and trenchant, elegiac yet often livened by humor, Richard's poems affirm the sustaining power of hope and love.

Poetry. Winner of the Tenth Gate Prize, 2018. In these poems Brad Richard creates a mythos that at first appears to be a warning about where our world is headed, yet reveals itself as a dirge for a way of being that we've not yet realized is gone. Richard's poems construct underground caverns where poetry moves dangerously. This collection is the accretion of decades of reading, thinking, and writing, borne out of long gestation."A cart rattles into the palace courtyard and explodes. A doomed king blesses the children, then commands the citizens of his ruined nation to root out invaders. Sentries fix their sights on a little girl. And, burrowed among tunnels beneath the capitol, and enormous wasp wasp flicks her antennae, pivots, and tests the air. In Parasite Kingdom, Brad Richard conjures up a wrecked world that is the twin of our own, but sifted through nightmare and apocalypse. Richly imagined and terrifying, this is a first-rate collection of poems."--Kevin Prufer, author of How He Loved Them and Churches "When insanity reigns in high places, and the culture has commodified human depths into glittering surfaces, when the Dow Jones serves as oracle, and reality reads from a script, perhaps we need most what Brad Richard works toward in Parasite Kingdom: a radical and instantaneous mytho-poesis that might give us perspective by breaking the whole damn thing apart. Taking both inspiration and refuge in Herman Melville--that fundamental chronicler of American unconscious--Richard gives us new apocrypha to ward off current apocalypse, offers us new symbols by which we might come to understand ourselves. Here the White Whale is replaced by the Parasitic Wasp, and the questions of unfathomable depths are replaced by questions of what has planted her eggs in our heads, and what life from them might emerge. Some of those lives, no doubt, are these very poems--as intricate and precise in their formal lives as the elegant casques of their totem wasps, as urgent as a sting, and furthering of genuine care--as a bee tends a field by burying itself in blossom--in the most unexpected of ways. As antidote is often made from the poison it counters, Parasite Kingdom gives us our needed dose, bitter to taste, but in the end, the truer vermifuge."--Dan Beachy-Quick, author of Circle's Apprentice and This Nest, Swift Passerine

Poetry. LGBT Studies. With a beauty purged of sweetness, the voices of BUTCHER'S SUGAR sing of the sublime in the debased, violence and desire, the truth of whatever is "rank with the carcass of mystery." Moving from childhood through adulthood, these poems re-inhabit and reclaim myths about the body and the self."Perhaps one turns to Christ or the pagan gods as an escape from the abject real of the body's stench. Perhaps to make love to a man is to always make love to the boy hidden underneath, forgotten. This need to both adore and kill what we no longer recognize within ourselves. Our bodies broken into, publicly shamed. Unmask the centurions, the butchers, and perhaps you'd instantly recognize their faces, Brad Richard suggests, if only you had his eyes to see."--Timothy Liu

Investigating time, memory, and loss, Brad Richard takes us from 19th century daguerreotypes and the work of painter Thomas Eakins to post-Katrina New Orleans. Scholarly yet yeasty, forceful yet kind, Motion Studies reunites the broken and the silenced with the living, with hope.