Out now: Some of You Will Know
David Rivard’s seventh book of poems is now available from Arrowsmith Press.
“Some of You Will Know refreshes an old sense of the lyric in which the soliloquy dares to have something to do with anyone who might be within earshot. Somehow, the poems hang suspended in a beautiful, tenacious, woodsy silence. I can hear the time the poet has waited for revelations in between the revelations, the time the poet has waited with the silence for language to emerge. David Rivard is that rare thing—an American at home in such quiet. At the most lucid moments in these poems, I feel scared in a good way. Some of You Will Know is a daring, unique book. It’s as suspenseful as a crime drama. It’s the moment before the monks dismantle the mandala. It’s as miraculous as a tattoo on moving water. It’s as unbelievable and needed in this day and age as a letter from the future, which, of course, it is.”
— Katie Peterson, author of A Piece of Good News
David Rivard
David Rivard is the author of seven books of poetry: Some of You Will Know (forthcoming 2022), Standoff, Otherwise Elsewhere, Sugartown, Bewitched Playground, Wise Poison, and Torque. His work has won the PEN/New England Prize in poetry, the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. He has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Massachusetts Arts Council, among others.
Additional Praise for David Rivard
“[Standoff] assailed me with its vivaciousness and cunning humor.”
— Major Jackson, The New Yorker
“What kind of grace rushes through these poems? …It makes one joyful, humble, aware, and richer for images one does not forget. It leaves me with a desire to be permanently friends with this mysterious kind of grace.”
— Tomaž Šalamun
“Rivard’s poems move…with an exhilarating, smart pace of association and evocation…These street-wise, book-wise, eloquent poems have a bracing sureness and scope.”
— Robert Pinsky, The Washington Post
“David Rivard’s Standoff is a beautiful book of political elegies….This isn’t a project. This is a collection of poems meant to show how the world leaves us fragmented, poems united here to remind us how we nevertheless continue whole.”
— Jericho Brown, 2017 PEN New England Award citation