Jim Richards

Poet. Here lies one who stares at words.

[Jim Richards @50before50]

Thanks to @FLPress for publishing my first collection of poems, Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right. These poems explore the relationship between fathers and sons, the enigma of time and mortality, and the peculiarities of daily life https://t.co/WINScIPpVL

[Jim Richards @50before50]

@7W_820wn https://t.co/0GZOOoSptq

[Jim Richards @50before50]

@amjuster @JosephBottum Great insights. Such a fine poem

[Jim Richards @50before50]

The video is a horrifying reminder of what lies beneath the world’s landfill problem https://t.co/KCmTl3pfzE

[Jim Richards @50before50]

Thanks to @firstthingsmag for publishing my poem about roadkill. https://t.co/8nFureOkQR

[Finishing Line Press @FLPress]

FLP BOOK OF THE DAY: Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right by Jim Richards
On SALE:   https://t.co/cPsB71maPa

Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right examines the sweet and strange journey from the small country of childhood to the perplexing universe of adulthood. At times serious and at times absurd, these short lyrics, aphorisms, and prose poems ponder the landmarks of birth and death along with the mysterious music that soothes and terrifies in between. Filled with probing questions and questions as answers, these poems don’t offer an easy route on life’s map but shine like streetlamps punctuating the dark road. #childhood #fatherhood #music #mystery #birth #death

Jim Richards has taught literature and creative writing since completing a PhD at the University of Houston. His poems have appeared in journals such as Poetry Northwest, Copper Nickel, Sugar House Review, Prairie Schooner, Hotel Amerika, and Southern Poetry Review. He has received nominations for Best New Poets, three Pushcart Prizes, and was granted a Literary Arts Fellowship through the Idaho Commission on the Arts. He lives and works in eastern Idaho’s Snake River Plain.

PRAISE FOR Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right by Jim Richards

Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right is a book of mid-journey, midlife, of being a son and father, exiled from childhood, reckoning with maturity. With his cunning wit and keen ear, Jim Richards tunes us to the music of mortality.
–Edward Hirsch

William Wordsworth once wrote, “Child is father of the man,” a paradox that could aptly serve as epigraph to this lovely and brave debut collection, Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right. We’re stuck in time, Jim Richards reminds us, and our task is to feel our way forward with grace. These poems lament and celebrate, whisper and sing. Above all, they remind us what it’s like to inhabit a body of clay and how to praise this messy, delicious life as we share it with others.
–Lance Larsen

Jim Richards’ poems at once desire understanding and honor what exceeds it. They resist bureaucratic attempts to measure our lives—and reveal that even when we try to shut out beauty, it “tries to creep back in.” In sincere, beautiful ruminations on the distances between fathers and sons, to more surreal poems where Emily Dickinson materializes on a ballfield or Guttenberg lunches at Chipotle, these poems allow the mundane and miraculous to rub elbows. While “the problem with understanding is that it never happens”—Richards’ poems still illuminate, reminding us that “from darkness, one must close one’s eyes to enter a great light.”
–Bethany Schultz Hurst

Please share/please repost  #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt  #poetry # FLP
#book #read #poems #childhood #fatherhood #music #mystery #birth #death

[Jim Richards @50before50]

@BradenRSmith Love this view!

[Jim Richards @50before50]

What this world needs
are guns
that fire poems

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 R. S. Thomas 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Mario Vargas Llosa 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

@nate_postlethwt I'm currently reading The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You
by Elaine N. Aron. Very interesting.

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 A. E. Housman 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Robert Frost 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Erica Jong 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Billy Collins 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

@MattMinicucci 😂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Phyllis McGinley 🎂

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Henrik Ibsen 🎂 from A Doll's House

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Naomi Shihab Nye 🎂 "Making a Fist"

[Jim Richards @50before50]

Orwell: we will become a captive people.

Huxley: we will become a trivial people.

Orwell: people will control us by inflicting pain.

Huxley: people will control us by inflicting pleasure.

[Jim Richards @50before50]

🎂 Niel Postman 🎂 from "Amusing Ourselves to Death"

Orwell: we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression.

Huxley: people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

[Jim Richards @50before50]

Orwell: we will be manacled and marched single-file into oblivion.

Huxley: we will dance ourselves to oblivion with an idiot smile on our face.