Twenty First Century Blues

Richard Cecil teaches in the Department of English and the Honors College of Indiana University, as well as in the Spalding University Brief-Residency MFA Program. A winner of the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry, he is the author of three previous books of poetry, Einstein's Brain, Alcatraz, and In Search of the Great Dead. His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, New England Review, and many other journals.

Twenty First Century Blues speaks to all of us whose lives fall short of the triumphs we had planned. Yet the Jaundice in Richard Cecil's eye is offset by clear vision. This book tells bitter truths, redeemed by memory, by wit, by craft, by accurate and resonant details. These poems say 'I came, I saw, I did not conquer, exactly, but I understood, I laughed, I celebrated by writing this down.' -Charles Harper Webb; ""Cecil's most distinguished poems range persistently along, accumulating data until patterns and conclusions that have been latent become apparent. Again and again a faith in the lurking significance of things pays off, and the early particulars add up to revelation."" -William Stafford