Brad Richard’s new collection of poetry, Butcher’s Sugar, published in October, 2012, is receiving interesting, favorable acclaim from poetry critics. His second collection of poems, Motion Studies, won the 2010 Washington Prize from The Word Works and was published in 2011. He also is the author of Habitations (Portals Press, New Orleans, 2000), and his poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Assembly, Barrow Street, Guernica, Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Winner of the 2002 Writers Exchange competition in poetry from Poets & Writers, Inc., and recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation and the Louisiana division of the arts, he has received residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center. Formerly with New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Riverfront, he is chair of the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.
ABOUT THE NEW COLLECTION
With a beauty purged of sweetness, the voices of Butcher’s Sugar sing of the sublime in the
debased, violence and desire, the truth of whatever is “rank with the carcass of mystery.” Moving from childhood through adulthood, these poems re-inhabit and reclaim myths about the body and the self.
REVIEW
There is a resource for outlaw talents on the edge in the fresh and adventuresome publishing house, Sibling Rivalry Press, whose editor somehow shines lights on poets we should know, artists so well keyed into their profession that their individual poems have found recognition and awards in poetry journals across the country, but whose significance and power can only be fully appreciated when a volume of their poetry is published in the sophisticated manner that editor Bryan Borland guides.
Case in point: Brad Richard. Here is a poet so fine that to say he has escaped the readers’ attention until now is embarrassing. He is from New Orleans – a fact that figures significantly in his poetry – and is chair of the Lusher Charter High School writing program. He is a gay poet who writes about his life and the stages of growing into his skin and his sexuality as well as some of the great poets of the past, including Walt
Whitman of course, but also Hart Crane, James Baldwin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Garcia Lorca, Genet, WH Auden, Thom Gunn and so on. Yet what makes Brad Richard’s unique is the manner in which he admixes passion with reserve, the longings for knowledge and acceptance that seep through the minds of young boys with the resignations of the aging male. And while the emotions he elicits are real and natural his magistery
of words and alchemy of phrasing place his poems in that realm of magic few others have developed.
—Grady Harp, Literary Aficonado
A GEM FROM THE BOOK
BUTCHER’S SUGAR
Beyond the candied peristyle
and sticky portals of the body.
Beyond the cavernous boudoir
Rank with the carcass of mystery,
in a lowland of swollen cane
chafed by the slutty wind…
Whatever it was that sweetened
one’s knowledge of the body,
however the epicure discerned
between fit meat and foul, eat:
too late to say you’re hungry
but not for this.
OTHER PRAISE
The integrity, candor and intelligence of these poems are crucial to our cultural moment, when, finally, male homoerotic desire and the poetry it produces can be heard as part of a tradition which includes Augustine, Wordsworth, and Stevens, as much as Whitman and Crane: all those who, attempting “to make a body out
of words,” sing of our love of, and vulnerability to, life.
—Christopher Davis, author of The Patriot
The sensation of reading Brad Richard’s Butcher’s Sugar is the sharp and cutting pleasure
of the “scrape of a blade honed in the heart,” to re-deply a line from one of the book’s several mesmerizing
self-portraits. These poems turn the self (and more pointedly an elegantly crafted queer subjectivity) into a pulsating, universal nerve caught between agony and ecstasy.
It’s a position the gay artist knows well—but few have rendered so deftly and poignantly
as Richard.
—Christopher Hennessy, author of Love-In-Idleness
ABOUT HIS OTHER WORK
Fence posts nearly covered by water in Gentilly during the Katrina flood caused by failure of badly engineered and maintained levees. Photo by David Rae Morris, courtesy of the Louisiana State Museuem, a partner of the Faulkner Society in presenting literary programming for New Orleanians and visitors to our city. David Rae is the son of the late Willie Morris, a wonderful writer and a great friend to the Faulkner Society.
This photo by David Rae Morris is symbolic of Brad Richard’s second collection of poems, Motion Studies, reflections on Katrina and its aftermath. Brad also is the author of Habitations (Portals Press, New Orleans, 2000), and his poems and reviews have appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Assembly, Barrow Street, Guernica, Iowa Review, Literary Imagination, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. Winner of the 2002 Writers Exchange competition in poetry from Poets & Writers, Inc., and recipient of fellowships from the Surdna Foundation and the Louisiana division of the arts and residencies at the Ragdale Foundation and the Vermont Studio Center, he is chair of the creative writing program at Lusher Charter School in New Orleans.
ABOUT BRAD RICHARD THE TEACHER
Brad is a superb teacher of creative writing as well as a practicing literary artist. His students at Lusher Charter School and those he taught previously during his tenure at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, Riverfront, regularly place as finalists, runners-up, and winners of the Faulkner Society’s William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. And this year is no exception. Several of his writing students are our finalist list, short list, and semi=finalist lists for the Short Story by a High School Student category. Three of his writers also have placed in adult categories. The winners and runners-up of these categories will not be known until after Labor Day, when judging is complete. Brad’s students regularly participate in the Society’s programs during Words & Music on a scholarship basis. Last year, for instance, he brought more than 100 students to hear National Book Award winner Tim O’Brien speak. He will be bringing more than 100 Lusher students to hear Ernest Gaines at the 2012 Master Class for High School students and teachers.