the entire Wasted great thing about the area, a finalist for the 2012 capable Muse publication Award, extols the attractive as comfortably because it expounds at the blemished. The reasoned commingles with the rambunctious, as in terms of the speaker who broadcasts that “our lives span diaper to diaper,/ and in among we piss on someone/ we can.” Little escapes become aware of in those poems of gutsy realism and formal deftness, which freely spotlight the fringes of society-the speaker in “Bellefontaine Cemetery” exhorts teenagers to “party on people’s graves” and feature “a few shut shaves with county sheriffs,” the carcass of a Ford truck intrudes on a climbing trail’s gully, the homeless are lullabied to “find leisure in the back of our dumpster/ . . . ranking a 5th of bourbon/ and locate your belly full.” Richard Newman brings us a suite that prods and soars with the grit and wonder of the true world.
PRAISE FOR all of the WASTED fantastic thing about THE WORLD:
Richard Newman’s all of the Wasted fantastic thing about the realm is masterful and magnetic, from the “galaxy of gnats” soaring within the St. Louis twilight to the way in which a backwoods junkyard “gnaws on a pile of previous Ford bones.” He sees a bunch of bored highschool young ones with “nothing to lose/ yet silly summer season jobs and innocence,” and captures with ideal acuity how “September rain in streetlight/ silvers the cypress needles, scatters new dimes/ one of the nuisance alley mulberry trees.” Newman’s poems, with their formal, lapidary precision, their indelible pictures of existence within the reasonable bars, again alleys, and rough-hewn edges of the Midwest, shock a starvation in us for a language higher, wilder, and unabashedly loftier than day-by-day speech.
-George Bilgere, writer of Imperial
The poems in Richard Newman's outstanding 3rd assortment, all of the Wasted fantastic thing about the area, are heady explorers. They roam from misplaced guy move to Benton Park, from downtown St. Louis to Southern Indiana, the entire whereas balancing wonderful musicality with lyric originality. in the middle of the wandering, there's longing in those poems-for position, for order, for morning. there's urgency, too, and wonder, wasted and another way, in areas we do not constantly anticipate it. Newman is a daring and masterful formalist in a free-verse global, and he makes use of sonnets, aubades, villanelles, and odes to reconcile the geographies of the internal and external. many times, this assortment makes us recalibrate our real north and forces us to re-evaluate the area for the entire unpredictable locations the place we will be able to locate beauty.
-Adrian Matejka, writer of the large Smoke
Newman makes use of the facility of recollection and imagery to craft odes, sonnets, villanelles, ballads, and unfastened verse with titles like “Four little ones Pissing off the Overpass after a Cardinals Game.” every one poem calls our recognition to a rough-and-tumble, daily the US we frequently force prior yet put out of your mind. all of the Wasted great thing about the area returns us to the true and, accordingly, the hot via placing at the brakes and asking us to appear, if simply in short, past our rear-views.
-Dorianne Laux, writer of The publication of Men
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Richard Newman is the writer of the poetry collections family Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009) and Borrowed cities (Word Press, 2005), in addition to numerous poetry chapbooks. His poems have seemed in most sensible American Poetry, street, Crab Orchard assessment, degree, New Letters, Poems & performs, Poetry day-by-day, The solar, Unsplendid, Verse day-by-day, and plenty of different periodicals and anthologies. His poem "Bellefontaine Cemetery" received first position within the 2010 Ledge Poetry Awards. He lives in St. Louis, the place he stories books for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and edits River Styx.