Red to the Rind

“Behold the door / the lock’s alive,” warns Stan Rice in one of the commanding poems that make up this new volume of verse. From the streets of New Orleans during Mardi Gras to the private chambers of the imagination, Rice’s work is at times sharp and minimalist and at times over the top in its vivid critique of life and in its regard for the sanctity that lurks in all experience. In these concise, memorable verses, he contemplates the stroller-pushing crowd in the American mall; he maps the complex traffic of a marriage; he speaks to the cat bristling in the closet: “—for you, / For your on-tiptoe hissing / Slit-pupiled arched-backed tail- / Stiffened terror, this song.” Throughout, Rice sings of the darkness that conflicts us and of the moments of pure consciousness that allow us to transcend darkness.

Stan Rice is the author of six collections of poetry, including The Radiance of Pigs, Fear Itself, and Singing Yet. He has been the recipient of the Edgar Allan Poe Award of the Academy of American Poets, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Formerly a professor of English and Creative Writing and Chairman of the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University, he now lives in New Orleans with his wife, the novelist Anne Rice.