And now ... the entertainment!

Richard Newman is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Domestic Fugues and Borrowed Towns, as well as four chapbooks — 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times, Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets!, Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations, and Greatest Hits 1990-2000.

Read selected poems, find out what people are saying about Richard's work, and order the books today.

• Domestic Fugues (Steel Toe Books, 2009)
• 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Firecracker Press, 2007)
• Borrowed Towns (Word Press, 2005)
• Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets!
  (Snark Publishing, 2005)
• Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations
  (Snark Publishing, 2004)
• Greatest Hits 1990-2000 (Pudding House)

The Writer's Almanac
Garrison Keillor featured Richard's poem "Fireflies," from Borrowed Towns, on The Writer's Almanac on May 22, 2006, and "Wild Game" on June 22, 2010.
Garrison Keillor also read "Home," from Domestic Fugues, on September 23. 2010.

American Life in Poetry
Richard's poem "Coins" was featured in Ted Kooser's "American Life in Poetry" column.

Best American Poetry
Richard's poem "Briefcase of Sorrow" has been picked by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins for inclusion in Best American Poetry 2006.

Poems featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily
Grampa's Liquor Bottles and Lessons from the Garden were featured on Poetry Daily. Bless Their Hearts, Home, and Little Fugue of Love and Death were featured on Verse Daily.

Borrowed Towns

Mowing

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

—classic Zen poem from the Zenrin Kushu

I'm no Buddhist, but I know enough of lawns
to say the grass grows by itself even
when I'm not sitting quietly. Take now,
for example: I'm in a terrible mood, full
of so much desire and April cruelty
I could wash away the four noble truths,
and, almost as I mow, the new growth
pushes against my chloroplasted shoes.
Even as a child visiting Virginia,
I gazed down picnic-perfect battlefields
and guessed that before the last cannonballs
burst and the last dying soldiers cried
their mothers' names into the air, the grass
was already swarming back up the bloody hills,
as it now goes about its green business
with entrepreneurial zeal, cracking sidewalks
and dishevelling my brick patio.
And when my daughter swings in our back yard,
crying, "Watch me, Daddy! Look how high!"
I look up from the mower as she launches
into the leafy arms of the trees, the whole
swingset heaving, then swoops back down again,
her bare feet riffling over the blades,
grass I scattered with my own two fists,
and I know—sitting, standing, quiet or not—
that as she grows there's nothing I can do.

(originally appeared in The Sun)

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Ash

for John Hilgert

With your cock-eyed rhythm you couldn't play your way
out of a 12-bar blues with your eyes closed,
so we'd strum a minute and spend the rest of the night
sighing and telling lies. Drowsy from pot roast,
we'd sprawl across the back porch and guzzle
Rolling Rocks like children eat chocolate,
though even then you complained of stomach pains,
and though I'd smoke a pack of cigarettes,
you would be the one we'd lose to cancer.
One night my backyard neighbor built a bonfire,
burning what must have been a decade's worth
of newspapers and phonebooks, who knows what—
wedding pictures, love letters? In a month
he'd sell his house and move. "Gee,"
you said, "that must feel really really good."
We watched his silhouette stalking back and forth,
tossing more and more things onto the fire,
each time sending up a fountain of sparks
blinking orange then drifting over the fence
into our yard, winking out and whitening
as they fluttered to us and settled on the porch
like a flock of grizzled gulls, a silent ash-storm.
We breathed and tasted ash, and you lay peppered
and unperturbed, an empty on your chest.
"You asleep?" I wondered. "No," you said,
"just taking in the night. And your neighbor's past.
But I wouldn't mind another beer." Inside,
I scrounged another stale cigarette,
bleeped the messages from my own ex-wife
("Who cares," you'd say, "she'll still be pissed tomorrow.")
and grabbed a few more beers for each of us,
but back out on the porch I found you gone,
drawn to the dying fire like a moth
or child, pushing your way through leafy greens,
my dogwoods, further into the dark. Below me,
the whole porch mottled in white and gray except
the blank space where your body had lain, your outline
in ash, and you, covered in the ashen remains
of what can only cling to us, the living.

(originally appeared in River Styx 63/64, dedicated to longtime Art Editor John Hilgert, 1956-2002)

Praise for Borrowed Towns

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

"... Newman's plain-spoken, poetic speech delivers far more than barnyard tales and half-deserted towns, typically with an insightful, sophisticated design that is transcendent and hard to forget." [Read the review]

Borrowed Towns was named one of the Kansas City Star’s 100 noteworthy books of 2005:

"You never know whether Newman is going to creep you out, provoke a thought or make you laugh, and, indeed, one of his key goals was to surprise." [Read the article]

From the St. Louis Riverfront Times:

"Layers of callowness, astute observation, truth and tough humor are Newman's poetry." [Read the review]

"Yes, it is possible to write poetry with both heart and edge. Richard Newman proves it with his stunning debut volume, Borrowed Towns. He applies his unique brand of savage humor and laconic aplomb to all the perils of Midwestern manhood, from lost love to found romance, from coming of age to fatherhood. Already one of our most skillful prosodists, he whets the blade of American diction, flourishing new rhythms for an upcoming generation. Newman is a poet to watch:  gifted, gimlet-eyed, and brave."

—Molly Peacock

"Even the monsters of Richard Newman's Borrowed Towns—his Bigfoot, Mothra, Cyclops, vampire—partake of everyday hopes and befuddlements, and so exist in the same terrain that we do, half-way between the marvelous and the mundane. Newman has ably set up camp in that land, and his poems (whether formal or unjacketed, comic or poignant) remind us constantly of the everyday magic where, for example, a simple handful of spare change is transformed into "dirty charms/ chiming in the dark pockets of the world." It's the everyday magic of Neruda's odes to the everyday objects of his life: read Newman's "Tastes Like Chicken" to experience that same wonder."

—Albert Goldbarth

Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets!

Mothra

Let's face it: I make a shitty monster. Moths
hardly instill fear in the hearts of man.
A cherry bomb could pound me back to powder,
and if the villagers only thought about it,
they could have simply built a giant bonfire
and I wouldn't have been able to resist--
I would have flown inside in a burning minute.

Did you know some moths have no mouths? They live
for seven days after sprouting wings,
time only to fuck, fly, and die.
Not me. I run at the mouth in my old age.
Now that my pupae have left the planet, I creep
down lonely streets at night, drawn to the few
windows not dark and shut but empty and blue.

(originally appeared in 5AM )

Bigfoot

Life is difficult when you don't exist.
Sometimes, deep in the snowy woods, I feel
so full of life I stop to check my wrist:
nothing. But I keep on, dig in big heels,
making my fake tracks and leaving false clues.
I once tore deer-crossing signs into confetti--
it went unnoticed. I compete for front-page news
with aliens, pop-stars, Nessy, and the Yeti.
Though tabloid space is tough to get these days,
you never let me die, forever seeing
what's not there. You human beings always
believe you can believe me into being.
You analyze a hair or sift through feces,
straining to find the ghost that haunts your species.

(originally appeared in Margie)

ISBN 1-933222-02-6
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Snark Publishing
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Praise for Monster Gallery

"In the most elegant of all poetic forms, Richard Newman chooses to portray the inner life of the least attractive characters of our imagination: vampires, blobs, Bigfoot, and whatever you think might be under your bed. With humor and some frightening turns of phrase, Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! will delight and amaze you by taking you inside the monster self to give you a fresh sense of what makes us truly human."

—Joanne Lowery

"Even the monsters of Richard Newman's Borrowed Towns--his Bigfoot, Mothra, Cyclops, vampire--partake of everyday hopes and befuddlements, and so exist in the same terrain that we do, half-way between the marvelous and the mundane."  

—Albert Goldbarth

"After Shakespeare turned us down, we thought no one would ever choose us as the subject for a sequence of sonnets. But Richard Newman got under our lumpy, slimy skins to discover the truth of our imaginary souls, so much like those of you humans. 'Life is difficult when you don't exist,' he writes, and readers of Monster Gallery can smell our loneliness in the dark sewers of our minds. You may lose some sleep over these poems, but you'll also find their humor, flair, and craft very refreshing. After all, would a moth lie to you?"

—Mothra

"If I had a soul, Newman would have captured it."

—anonymous vampire

"Blrb! Blrrp! Blhglp!!!"

—The Blob

"If you don't like this book, I'll rip your damn head off and suck your brains!"

—Gristlehead

Tastes Like Chicken and Other Meditations

Tastes Like Chicken

Quail, pheasant, goose you might expect,
but froglegs, rabbit, squirrel, rattlesnake—
these things, too, I promise, taste like chicken.
And if you like the taste of chicken, try
the llama or the alligator soup,
terrapin creek turtle or roasted dove.
Don't be intimidated by strange game
or kangaroo or wild stir-fried dog.
More often than not, most things taste like chicken.
But one thing you might think tastes like chicken,
at least a very big chicken, is ostrich,
which actually doesn't taste like chicken at all,
but tastes like steak, or maybe a filet mignon.
Your small game birds—plover, thrush, lark,
snipe, and woodcock—taste like chicken. Partridge
tastes like chicken. Muskrat tastes like chicken,
and a lot of things you wouldn't even guess:
the sweetness of success or bitter failure,
a savory victory or a bloody vengeance,
that special yearn for lost childhood, family
roots, and what you'd call the zest of life—
all compare closely to the taste of chicken.
And yes, I know what you're about to say:
that even though it's all chicken, the secret
lies in the infinite ways we can prepare it.
Let me remind you that any way you cut
through countless recipes and endless sauce,
it all boils down to the basic chicken,
clucking over this entire chickenshit world,
more common than trees and good, black dirt.
After all, we made the chicken, bred it,
adjusted it to the human taste bud—
the bare standard we now hold to nature.
So you better learn to like the taste of chicken,
and more important than that, its aftertaste,
which you may belch up again and again
from that unsettling soup deep in your belly.

(originally appeared in Delmar)

Praise for Tastes Like Chicken

"If Robert Frost had moved, as a child, to Southern Indiana in the late twentieth century instead of Vermont in the late nineteenth, he'd have sounded like Richard Newman. The characters in Tastes Like Chicken (Snark Publishing, 2004) even the dead and buried ones, come alive—they're not the psychic punching bags of "confessional" poetry, or the saints and villains of "political" poetry, but real, sad, off balance, and—let me say it—loveable characters of good fiction (and good poetry, provided Robert Frost wrote it). As a bonus, Tastes Like Chicken is funny as hell. This book isn't just readable, it's re-readable."  

—Richard Cecil, author of Twenty First Century Blues

Greatest Hits 1990-2000

Crawlspace

Our parents didn't think that we were home,
but squatting among the dirt and mouse turds
and daddylonglegs of those concrete catacombs,
my brother and I heard every single word,
heard them utter for the first time "divorce,"
such a racket like the wrath of Our Lord,
voices lashing, barging, broken, then hoarse,
footsteps pounding on the wooden floorboards
that from our side were spiked with rusty nails
twisting in flashlight beams. They'd always love us,
they said later, though at the time we couldn't exhale,
like the whole house was coming down on top of us.
But we hunkered down, refused to take flight.
Nothing could have dragged us into daylight.

(originally appeared in Boulevard)