We Find Each Other in the Darkness: Poems (The TRP Chapbook Series)
Description
The poems of We Find Each Other in the Darkness take inspiration from the Imagist tradition of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. These poems emphasize an unraveling of localized places, such as the urbanization of Jackson, the rural Mississippi Delta, and the ecologically fragile Gulf Coast, through surreal and magically real points of view. In some ways these new poems are Southern Magical Realism. They work with an awareness reminiscent of the nonfiction essays of Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street, and create dialectics of experiences about disparate peoples in far away and unfamiliar locations.
The TRP Chapbook Series
Praise for We Find Each Other in the Darkness: Poems (The TRP Chapbook Series)
“Richard Boada’s We Find Each Other in the Darkness details a fractured, fragile world, a Mississippi landscape of relentless heat and morning dew, of cigarettes and distant train whistles, a world where we’re aloof from both city streets and country homes. In short, a world peopled by characters from Lucinda Williams’s songs: alternately tender and destructive, cruel and gracious, dazzled and disappointed by the natural world, stunned by beauty and maddened by love. Yet even as they’re beaten and betrayed, as language fails them and church fails to save them—pews moved to the Amtrak station, as they chase vanishing trains—they cling to hope. If lovemaking only reveals a mutual loneliness, these temporary communions nonetheless stir the heart to greater depths: we can’t fully love or understand one another, but we can at least stand guard over one another as we live our lives.”
—Paul Griner, author of Second Life
“Since I first picked up Error of Nostalgia I knew Richard Boada was a curious spirit whose voice, vision, and words were a heartbeat for the people. Specifically, Mississippi folks who see the history, landscape, culture, and energy through both a proud fixture and voyeuristic lens. We Find Each Other in the Darkness is a manifesto on when our voyeurism turns inward and forces us to face ourselves. Whether it’s dragonflies or Farish Street, the protagonist here is forced to face both the cigarette ash and the fire which sparked it. As we experience the complications of our hero as Mississippi tour guide, we become invested and gut-punched, and implicated in the darkness—perhaps our voyeurism might be the darkness. We Find Each Other in the Darkness is a poignant declaration of love and stains by a poet who loves us and our shortcomings like he loves our Mississippi.”
—Derrick Harriell, Author of Ropes and Stripper in Wonderland
“In this guided tour of Mississippi's landscapes, Richard Boada's fine poems never forget how the land and its people are inseparable, and report the truth of the human news, that each day can be filled with love and hate, thrills and disappointments in equal measure. These poems are snapshots of a people and a land that I know and love, and this collection a grand tour of America's most misunderstood state, its burning fields and crumbling highways and city corners, all rendered with the compassion and care of a poet working at the height of his power.”
—Steve Kistulentz, author of The Luckless Age and The Mating Calls of the Dead
