The House in the Heart

Publication Date - December 2007

Willie James King's poems probe, dig, and tunnel. But THE HOUSE IN THE HEART resists easy epiphanies even as King asks for -- insists on -- all the complexities and trials of insight, of self-knowledge. "I was the fractured one/double-visioned," he writes, "foaming/ like a beast, while it,/ the true beast, was calm/ as a hard-handed teacher. His lessons may be "hard-handed," yet they are also touching, arresting, perhaps even true.
-- Robert Polito

Willie James King writes poems that seem to have been in our midst all along; his words “touch air.” His unweaving and reassembling of the natural world and his black male southern life, in such a wondrous, meditative vernacular makes The House in the Heart more than a worthy read; it is as nourishing as a rainbow glimpsed briefly on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
-- Major Jackson

From an Alabama boyhood to an adulthood of serious soul-searching, the poems of Willie James King roam but never wander. These focused blasts of lyricism combine tones and dictions and hit the high Cs. Whether in the sweet-potato field, at the lectern, or gazing into the waters of the Cahawba river, King learns where he is most himself, “in this deep / lull of love.”
-- Alan Michael Parker

Anyone who enters this house, so sturdily constructed by the poet’s art and craft, his wisdom and childlike awe, will find himself at once both chilled and warmed by King’s far-reaching vision, his deep passion, his immense and inspiring talent.
-- Cathy Smith Bowers

Spillway - 13

Publication Date - November 2007

Swagger and Remorse

Publication Date - November 2007

Richard Fox weaves lyrical magic in his Swagger & Remorse, a book-length series of poems at once intimate (I’d rather be a river than anything else.) and richly metaphysical (Trees look inside the houses, see all the wood & cannot look away.). There are gorgeous lines absolutely everywhere. They help us to consider grief—I’ll always/think of you as I pretend to eat the living air or pull/an origami swan out of nowhere/or out of someone’s ear—with humor and mystery and an elegant humanity. They show us our crazy world of war and moonrises, they hold paradox, they gift us with truth. (A rainbow/raptures down/freighted with pain.) I recommend these distilled and powerful poems, with their birds and trees and houses and fires and rivers and hands and salt and blood to anyone who would like a fresh pair of eyes—Once a year the flowers on this very porch take wing/as if they just remembered something.—and a whole new landscape to marvel over.
-- Maureen Seaton

Richard Fox's collection Swagger & Remorse is a stunning volume of poetry. A book length sequence of speculative meditations upon faith and man's trust in human possibility -- and the potential loss of both -- these poems are philosophically protean, stylistically adept, and constantly shifting in their perspectives and attitudes. The authority of voice here is startling. Working at times with parable and fragment, Richard Fox often places us in the context of the natural world even as we are asked to question the stability of any "place." Swagger & Remorse is elliptical, gestural, and elegant in all of its observations and methods. These are the mature poems of man in the middle of fierce and powerful reckonings with experience and the residue of hope, a man recognizing that he may look to the constellations above yet will always walk the earth beneath. These fragments of prayer, ecstasy, and regret make Swagger & Remorse an unforgettable collection of poetry.
-- David St. John
Judge, The Patricia Bibby First Book Award, 2007

A Café in Boca
Publication Date - November 2007

Reading Sam’s poems is a little like falling down a magic rabbit hole:  the world you thought you knew gets rearranged and what you’re likely to encounter is “pain or the funniest thing in America,” often both in the same moment.  Sam has a certain dead-pan way of inventing stories in a lingo that makes them all the more remarkable.  He’s an original.
--Peter Everwine

When I think of languages combining like blood and milk, resulting in surprising lyric changes across someone's poetry, I think of Sam Pereira's work and a rural background of Portuguese fishermen. He moves from the female oratory to a punk idiom as skillfully as anyone half his age just now beginning to write poems. There is a shyness in Pereira's work that insists on invented lives that arrive in the morning, a heavy deliberate and as flabbergasted as the rising sun.
--Norman Dubie

I’ve been an admirer of Sam Pereira’s poetry for thirty years now, marvelling constantly at his intelligence and humor, his bravado and high style. Sam Pereira’s poems are often both disarming and alarming, or perhaps, first alarming, and then tenderly disarming. There is a fantastic American swagger to these poems, part John Berryman and part Richard Hugo, part Hemingway and part film director David Lynch (if you don’t understand what I mean, check out “Cat Galaxies”). The hyper-real intensity is mediated by the irreal, or the surreal, as public histories and private histories collide and send showers of sparks across the page of every poem.
-- David St. John

Dragon Ship

Publication Date - November 2007