In NUDE SIREN, Richards invites the reader into a found world of sense and idea, of time and movement, of the body and its secrets. At once sensuous and esoteric, these poems move between intellectual curiosity and emotional experience with a deft and compassionate hand. Through curving syntax and multiple voices, words themselves become fetishistic objects, ordinary lives take on a rare voluptuousness, and the relentless pursuit of the new yields a tentative, harrowing redemption of the old. Haunted by possibility and grasping after erotic and spiritual connection, the faceted world of NUDE SIREN confronts the physicality of language, and of ourselves. "We never leave the world as we know it but are given it cracked and glazed through incantatory rites of formal elegance, gritty emotional longing, and a seemingly limitless verbal range"--Dean Young.

Author City: URBANA, IL USA

Peter Richards was born in 1967 in Urbana, Illinois. He is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the John Logan Award. His poems have appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, FENCE, The Yale Review, and other journals. He is the author of OUBLIETTE (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2001), which won the Massachusetts Center for the Book Honors Award; NUDE SIREN (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2003); and HELSINKI (Action Books, 2011). The University of Montana-Missoula's visiting Hugo Poet Spring Semester 2011, Richards has taught at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston.