Strange Antlers

"Richard Jarrette combines erudition with profound simplicity and breathtaking beauty in Strange Antlers. He is a true disciple of the ancient masters, who can be heard and felt in these elegantly crafted poems full of poignancy and wisdom."

-Yun Wang, translator of Dreaming of Fallen Blossoms: Tune Poems of Su Dong-Po

"It is a glorious book and feels like it was written in a passion or a trance. I find it so powerful and poignant. I love the long titles that tell about his childhood and emotional state. They let me into the speaker in a way that matters to me. It is a magnificent work."

-Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing

"Friend and disciple to the more-than-slightly-intoxicated classical Chinese poets who fled court life to live in thatched huts, Richard Jarrette epitomizes many of their qualities: pungent and poignant imagery, and a Rip-Van-Winkle loneliness about the passage of time and relationships. But the precise juxtaposition of beautiful and terrible-'Boy reads by refinery flare stack light / taste of sulphur on condemned air'-is Jarrette's own marvelous signature."

-Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas

Gazing into the abyss of perilous times, Jarrette turns to the master poets of the ages who formed his mind and ethics seeking guidance-Sappho to W.S. Merwin and particularly the classical Chinese. Strange Antlers weaves ancient and free verse forms into a startling conversation about the headlines and survival that remembers and seeks wisdom's way.

RICHARD JARRETTE is the author of Beso the Donkey (Michiga...