Contract Signed! Words for What Those Men Have Done Will Be Out Later This Year

Please forgive the back-to-back self-promotional postings, but I am excited! My second book of poems, Words for What Those Men Have Done, has (finally!) found a home with Guernica Editions. The book should be out later this year. Here are the lines from which the book’s title comes:

I don’t remember what song I chose,
and it’s been a decade at least
since I’ve told anyone
about my son’s first moments
as my son, but they’ve come to me here,
in this urologist’s waiting room,
because I picked up from the coffee table
this copy of The Nation
another patient must have left behind,
and the first article I opened to,
“Silence=Rape,” by Jan Goodwin,
introduced me to Shashir,
six years old and gang raped
in the Congo. When they found her,
she was starving;
and when they found her,
she could neither walk nor talk;
and so they stitched together
the parts of her the men had ruptured,
fed her, gave her clothing,
and that night she slept
for the first time since no one knew when
in a bed that was not
the bush the militia had left her to die in;
and maybe the tent walls
shaping the room she lived in
when Goodwin learned she existed
had come to mean for her
a kind of safety; and maybe
that safety was fertile ground,
where words for what those men had done to her
dropped like seeds
from the mouths of those who rescued her
and began to take root.

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4 Responses to Contract Signed! Words for What Those Men Have Done Will Be Out Later This Year

  1. 1
    Ampersand says:

    This is wonderful news. Congratulations, Richard!

  2. 3
    Sarah says:

    Congratulations! I don’t often comment here, but I’ve seen your posts about poetry and always stopped to read them, because your poetry is good. Good news about the book!

  3. Thanks, Sarah! I really appreciate your kind words.