Description
Poetry. Winner of the 2018 Tenth Gate Prize. In these poems Brad Richard has created 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. PARASITE KINGDOM uses the architectural tools of Moby-Dick and Borges' El Aleph in the construction of underground caverns where Richard's poetry moves deftly, dangerously. A collection such as this could only have been written after the accretion of decades of reading, thinking, and writing. The Tenth Gate imprint exists in acknowledgement of precisely this kind of poetry: that borne only out of long gestation. Says Dan Beachy-Quick, "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."
Author Bio
Brad Richard's books include PARASITE KINGDOM, Habitations, MOTION STUDIES, winner of the Washington Prize and finalist for the 2012 Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle, and Butcher's Sugar. He has also published three chapbooks, The Men in the Dark, Curtain Optional, and Larval Songs. His poems and reviews have appeared in journals such as American Letters & Commentary, The Iowa Review, Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, and many others. Richard lives in New Orleans where he was the 2015 Louisiana Artist of the Year as well as recipient of awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Inc. and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Author City: NEW ORLEANS, LA USA