Description
Poetry. "STUDIED DAYS sings with strange and sensual enchantment, calling the reader into that other time, that other 'halfway place of slopes' where human longing assumes memory's abiding shapes. Know the well with its 'single eye of moonlight shimmer[ing] at the bottom, forty lean years deep.' Study the woman in the night, naked and sleeping upon creek stone, only one dream away from betrayal—and consider, too, how the bearded, bloodied, drunken man stumbles through 'frog-slicked ditches' toward experience's ripening truth. The Appalachian Ohio landscapes of Hague's early manhood hold the lonely language of birds, insects, dark waters—it is here where the dead must rise to assume 'the holy duties of their flesh' and where the living keep 'going down' to make sense of the shadowy places beyond home. Exuberance and grief entwine in this stunning narrative collection." —Sherry Cook Stanforth
Author Bio
Richard Hague, a native of Steubenville, Ohio in the Appalachian Ohio River Valley, taught at Purcell Marian High School in Cincinnati for 45 years. While there he engaged in other enterprises and adventures, including adjuncting at Edgecliff College and at Xavier University, his alma mater, commercial urban gardening, hosting writers workshops, and teaching for a few summers at the Institute for Professional Development and Graduate School of Education at Northeastern University in Boston. His high school career ended when he refused to sign an anti-gay and anti-worker's rights Archdiocese of Cincinnati contract in May 2014. Not long after, he was named Writer-in- Residence at Thomas More University in northern Kentucky, where he continued as Artist-in-Residence until 2022. He now teaches and writes with The Originary Arts Initiative. He is author, co-editor, or editor of 20 collections, most recently RIPARIAN: POETRY, SHORT PROSE AND PHOTOGRAPHY INSPIRED BY THE OHIO RIVER (Dos Madres Press, 2019), Earnest Occupations: Teaching, Writing, Gardening & Other Local Work (Bottom Dog Press, 2018), STUDIED DAYS: POEMS EARLY & LATE IN APPALACHIA (Dos Madres Press, 2017), WHERE DRUNK MEN GO: A LONG POEM (Dos Madres Press, 2015) and DURING THE RECENT EXTINCTIONS: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1984-2012 (Dos Madres Press, 2012), for which he was given the Weatherford Award in Poetry Writing Award. He continues to live in Cincinnati.
Author City: CINCINNATI, OH USA