An Alchemy in the Bones: Poems

By William Reichard

'It's about what can be bent,' William Reichard writes in a poem called 'Bonsai.' These poems, too, are about the ways we're bent by experience: by loss and by desire, by love and difficulty. William Reichard's poems are beautifully open to the 'bent' in all its senses: the not-straight, the damaged, the curves the world throws us. These delicately etched lyrics are attentive to what Reichard calls 'the intricacy of emotion;' it doesn't surprise, then, that this poet has a particular gift for the love poem, for the text of tenderness, the body's 'dazzling code.'"--Mark Doty, author of Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898231949
• ISBN13: 9780898231946
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: New Rivers Press
• Length: 88 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.3" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Intense, passionate, articulate, lyrical verse and imagery.

William Reichard is a master of intense, passionate, articulate, lyrical language cased in lyrical verse and imagery. An Alchemy In The Bones is a superb anthology introducing a major talent to an appreciative audience. Without Translation: With sewn lips he speaks/in a dazzling code that I cannot translate./But the body has other mouths from which to speak,/and these, I do comprehend:/How the blade of the should has a tongue,/and speaks./How the abdomen, sweetly heaving, has a tongue,/and speaks./I wish I had a key, the proper code to unlock/the door to his desire,/a dictionary to decipher the distance/which my mind cannot span,/but my dry heart, my lips, my clumsy instinct,/can.

long term surprise

Poems that chart a journey of linking the self to a shifting community. Lyric, sensitive, ironic poems that take us through the rooms of the heart.

profound and moving work

This book is a testimony to the transformative power of art, using language and imagery to alchemize the gold out of the tragedies of our lives. It is indispensable for all libraries, big and small, public and private.

poetry that reveals the magnificence of the small life

Reichard's poems unveil the beauty and human splendor beneath the midwestern husk. There is so much living in these poems, so many sublte and gorgeous reminders of how we are, body to body, as a human family. Glorious!

Poems about family, transition, safety, home, loss

Reichard writes out of the specifics of his situation-a gay man from a small town, rural family background who has established a life in the city-in a way that reveals universal truths about the sustaining relationships in our lives. These poems, which both praise and question, are ultimately tributes to family, friends, and home.