Skip to main navigation Skip to main content
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King has won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature!!!  Buy now
Book Title

Wise Poison

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
David Rivard
Body
"I love these intense, brilliantly crafted poems. Wise Poison is perfectly pitched and uniquely American, a beautiful, angry, heartbreaking, celebratory, and powerful book."—Thomas Lux

In Wise Poison David Rivard gives us a mind hard at work on the most vital questions: Who am I? What do I love? What can be trusted? At issue in these passionate arguments with the self are the "curious forces" that surround us in every part of our lives. In an airport lounge in the Yucatán, in the song of a street musician, or simply in the pulsing of skin along the neck, Rivard finds connections and doubt, and reason for both comfort and rage.

"The poems in David Rivard's compelling and delicious new book do not smother you with grandiosity nor come creeping towards you bowed down in self-effacement. These are poems of a human scale; they are complicated, muscled with irony, and their wonderful voice is startling in its power to move, interest, delight."—Lynn Emanuel

Share Title

List Price
$12.95
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-247-9
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
74
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
Winner of the James Laughlin Award

About the Author

David  Rivard
Credit: Matt Valentine
David Rivard is the author of six poetry collections, including Standoff, Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, and Wise Poison, winner of the James Laughlin Award. He recently received the O. B. Hardison Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and teaches creative writing at the University of New Hampshire.

http://www.davidrivard.net/
More by author

Praise

Back to Table of Contents