Nude Siren [Paperback]

Peter Richards (Author)

Book Description

Series: Adventures in Poetry | Publication Date: May 1, 2003

"For Richards, life in a poem is like life in a body—most at risk, and most fully at play."—David Rivard, Ploughshares

Exfoliating language with wit, Nude Siren is sardonic, intimate, sump-tuous; an exacting sense of remaking the probabilities of words. Richards knows where to find the sinister in humor, and the grace conveyed by beige light.

Peter Richards 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. He is the author of Oubliette (Verse Press, 2001).

Editorial Reviews

Review

His radiant, transformative poetry can do the hustle on the head of a pin and remain poignant, open, and true. -- Peter Gizzi

Incantory rites of formal elegance, gritty emotional longing, and a seemingly limitless verbal range. -- Dean Young

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Wave Books; 1 edition (May 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0939010747
• ISBN-13: 978-0939010745
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,512,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't go home with the coat room, March 12, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Nude Siren (Paperback)

Go home with me...It's about time I say something about this book. It's been sitting on my desk, along with Chelsey Minnis's Zirconia and Frank O'Hara's Collected, for nearly a year. Each of these books is like a trough I feed at. I find Nude Siren particularly liberating and generative. No one can reinvent language the way Richards can and still maintain emotional urgency in each and every poem. Other poems that try to do so become disembodied--just words. Right now I keep re-reading the last third of the book, poems which seem to be written by a posthumous speaker. In "At the fair the solemnity of her dress," "wind is a broken off piece of the fair." It is so tender and there is too much to quote in this beautiful book. I always tell my students the Wittgenstein quotation, "The limits of your language are the limits of your world." This poet's world doesn't seem to have any limits.

3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A startling and important new voice, April 27, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Nude Siren (Paperback)

Peter Richards' second collection of poems, _Nude Siren_, is wildly alive and at play in its own magically attractive worlds. These poems are clearly explorations, experimentations by a poet who loves words--loves the taste of them, the texture, the way they drip through his fingers onto the page...
This is a book that contemporary poets should own. It teaches us to embrace the "inner suggestions" the mornings "suggest to themselves and to me / who cannot hear the morning." It is a book to be kept under your pillow, to be taken out only when you feel capable of setting yourself adrift through his many "Bulb[s] of Percussion." At times whimsical, at times dark, always sincere and thoroughly convincing, these poems will grab you on the inside, in places you didn't even know you had.