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I Have to Write by Ted Richer
Preview works from the collection:
Observed
Like That
Bury the Dead
I Have to Write// by Ted Richer // 978-0991622269
June 2018
price: $9.95
paper binding
poetry
PURCHASE
Ted Richer
// Click here to learn more about this author at his Amazon page.

"Richer knows the writer must not give up before the protean word or phrase, line or pause, is properly constrained and allowed to yield just what is asked of it—just that."

- Marcia Karp

In this first collection of his work to be released in the United States, Ted Richer gives us a new set of “figurations”, a form of his invention which he deploys as vignette, meditation, monologue and dialogue. Each open-spaced poem contains a compact, plangent drama. Lines, phrases and motifs unspool through repetition, albeit repetition that shows deft intelligence in its decision to alter a word here, a letter there, and leave the rest alone. This is not poetry of gaudy transformation, but of masterful refraction.

About the author:

Ted Richer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Founding Faculty Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His writing has appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, Literary Imagination, Harvard Review, James Joyce Quarterly, Leviathan, New York Quarterly, Free Inquiry, The Poetry Porch, Poetry Northeast, Clarion, and Daedalus. Richer was subject of a BBC Radio 3 presentation by Christopher Ricks on Twenty Minutes. His work has been included in the anthology Joining Music with Reason: 34 Poets, British and American, Oxford 2004-2009, chosen by Christopher Ricks (Waywiser, 2010).

Reader and critical responses to Richer's work:

Larry Stark, The Theatre Mirror: “Terse, enigmatic and evocative examinations of the poet’s experience... ”

Marcia Karp: “Richer's figurations are washed in silence. Attend; you'll hear writing that is clean to the bone.”

Richard J. Fein: “The voices, the pauses, the repetitions, the near repetitions of Ted Richer's poetry are like the impromptus of Schubert—notes that haunt. And yet in their obsessions and eeriness they are also echoes of conversations one had, or might have had, or both.This is the alchemy of Ted Richer's poetry—the way the words make their mix, unmix; the way the voices blend, unblend—our condition.”

Tim Dee, BBC Radio 3: “Richer’s works glimmer magically and movingly on the edge of performance, poetry and drama.”