Some of You Will Know - by David Rivard (Paperback)

About the Book

James Laughlin Prize winner David Rivard's newest book solidifies him as one of our best and most enduring poets. Both deeply personal and enticingly universal, Some of You Will Know, startles the heart and invites the mind to play.

Book Synopsis

Come read for yourself why James Laughlin Prize winner David Rivard's newest book solidifies him as one of our best and most enduring poets. With poems that are both deeply personal and enticingly universal, Some of You Will Know, startles the heart and invites the mind to play. With a controlled hand, Rivard guides us into a world that shows what words can do. Of Rivard's work, Robert Pinsky tells us, "The speed of mind, compressing details and emotions, covering the maximum distance in the least time, gives this writing its thrill.

Review Quotes

"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

"[Standoff] assailed me with its vivaciousness and cunning humor."-Major Jackson, The New Yorker

"David Rivard presents a range of memories and circumstances where the poet stares down mortality and emerges from the skirmishes with his compassion and perceptiveness intact....The poems don't present easy answers; instead, they offer an astute guide through everyday experiences, including the desire to both lose and elevate the self."-Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

"Rivard's poems move through such subject matter with an exhilarating, smart pace of association and evocation. The speed of mind, compressing details and emotions, covering the maximum distance in the least time, gives this writing its thrill. These street-wise, book-wise, eloquent poems have a bracing sureness and scope." -Robert Pinsky, Washington Post

"Wise Poison gives us floods, highways, self-exposure, over-exposure, pink light, "the consuming lime & gin of the later"-Rivard is our best poet of such states since the days of new verse by Denis Johnson or James Wright.... His aerial sentences defy the pull of line breaks, then snap down into epigrammatic, end-stopped closure, like birds diving over open ocean for rare prey; his subject is our unrealistic aspirations, the ways we can feel dead without them, and the ways poetic language can incubate and give wings to strange ambitions." -Stephanie Burt, Yale Review