The Radiance of Pigs: Poems

Stan Rice's poems are outside the circle of coventional poetry in their adherence to the strong, expressionist drive which makes his work so interesting as well as entirely his own.

People tend to have strong opinions about his work, which led Publisher's Weekly to describe an
earlier volume of new and selected poems, Singing Yet, as "serious stuff, urgent and original."

His last book, Fear Itself, in its wild unpredictability, received praise from Graham Christian in Library Journal as follows: "Rice is an expert practitioner of the paranoiac-surreal; he walks the disquieting dreamscape familiar from the work of such poets as Galway Kinnell and Charles Simic . . . His true
subject is the uneasy equation between horror and beauty, the 'liquification of flame' and the horror of order. He is often capable of delivering the instructive surprises of the best poetry."

The same doomsday energy and observation suffuse his new work.

Stan Rice is the author of five collections of poetry, including Fear Itself and Singing Yet. For many years he was associated with San Francisco State University, where he was Professor of English and Creative Writing, Assistant Director of the Poetry Center, and Chairman of the Creative Writing Department. He has been the recipient of the Edgar Allen Poe Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and a writing fellowship for the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, the novelist Anne Rice.