Domestic Fugues

by Richard Newman

Poetry $12.00

Praise for Richard Newman

Richard Newman's plainspoken, forceful voice is lifted up and transformed inside these elegant and complex poems that echo the piling up of voices in a Bach fugue.  He writes of ordinary life--marriage, family, work--but finds ways to release tension and anger so that we come out in a new place that is both formally and emotionally satisfying.  His greatness, for all his technical skill, is to give us a sense that we are all in this together, that he's out there for all of us, figuring out how to make sense of muddled, disappointed lives, those "hours spent on nothing more than money."  In Domestic Fugues, Newman, like Woody Guthrie, uses the rhythms of American speech to prod us, empower us, and delight us.

--Maura Stanton

As the title implies, Richard Newman's Domestic Fugues is a musical confrontation with the difficult and painful recurrences of middle age--love lost and love renewed, the depredations of time and change, the fear of aging as diminishing possibility.  But as the title also suggests, and as the poems consistently demonstrate, this is also a book about enduring need and the transformative power of song.  Domestic Fugues is a lovely, grimly funny and always moving celebration of persistance.

--Alan Shaprio

Domestic Fugues Featured on Verse Daily, October 10, 2009

http://www.versedaily.org/2009/aboutrichardnewmandf.shtml

http://www.versedaily.org/2009/littlefugue.shtml

About the Author

Richard Newman is the author of the poetry collection Borrowed Tears (Word Press, 2005) and several poetry chapbooks, including 24 Tall Boys: Dark Verse for Light Times (Snark Publishing/ Firecracker Press, 2007) and Monster Gallery: 19 Terrifying and Amazing Monster Sonnets! (Snark Publishing, 2005).  His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Daily, The Sun, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and many other periodicals and anthologies.  He lives with his wife and daughter in St. Louis, where he teaches at St. Louis Community College, edits River Styx, and co-directs the River Styx at Duff's Reading Series.