Tad Richards

My Night With the Language Thieves

Poems in form and free verse, with illustrations by the author

"Richards reconnoiters a fugitive terrain whose inhabitants are disturbingly familiar and unsettlingly memorable particularly the women, lithe and button-breasted or forty with stretchmarks or old and bony, wise and tolerant or buoyant under you, as he put is, like a small craft. Richards' craft, however, is considerable buoyant and grave by turns yet, like his women, consistently tender, tolerant and wise." -- Donald Finkel

"Tad Richards is the Tom Waits of contemporary poetry gritty, original, and great fun." -- Nancy Willard

"Tad Richards' poems are generous and appealing, venturing into that realm on the borders of prose, unafraid of narrative and even of humor, where they engage the world in a way that is instructive and enlightening. This is a most impressive and delightful collection, the work of a poised and mature talent. -- David R. Slavitt

A sample from the book
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Situations: A Novel in Verse

"Starting with the most unpromising of unpoetic materials--one-sentence summaries of episodes of TV shows--Tad Richards has created a human comedy populated with characters real and imaginary, all on a scope to rival Pushkin. Crazy and crazed, erotic and tender by turns, Byronic in its formal extravagance--Situations answers the reader's most basic question: What's on next?"
-- R. S. Gwynn

"Tad Richards has written a laugh-to-tears, madcap verse novel based on nearly-random snippets of plot, the sort the TV section of newspapers print about weekly sitcoms. These strange fragments (A restaurant critic dies,' 'Bob gets involved in Harlan's romance') became the springbooard for 24 episodes that brilliantly animate the adventures of super-sexed, cross-gendered, and even different-specied characters. Replete with pop-culture and classical allusions, sufferers of Richards's wit, such as Ross Perot, Steve and Eydie, Ice Cube, Howard Hughes, embellish a world where anything can happen and every conceivable thing does. The Major, Polly, Carlene, Mad Dog, and a veritable cast of thousands, traverse the country and the globe (Perot is traded to the Russians), going to Hell and back, and finally, to heaven. Puns, non sequiturs, songs, verbal caprices of every sort ('Bob's standing in the doorway, looking doleful') charm the reader at every turn. If you relish, as I do, unmitigated originality, delight in imaginative fancy, embedded in a dazzling range of reference and beautifully measured in (mostly) iambic pentameter quatrains--you can't beat Situations for entertaining fun."
--Gray Jacobik