Anarch.

Poetry. This collection of poems addresses the fundamental question of our time: what is it to be human? If we are strange to each other and ourselves, then how do we know it? What is strangeness if not a recognition of something we can recognize? We can no longer see the earth (especially from the sky) as uneffected by all our experiments, hurled down, trashed, in pursuit of happiness. Frances Richard goes to the material roots of our search and turns away, and takes off, after another purpose. This book has the spirit of anthropology and philosophy, and also reveals the underlying structures of these two disciplines as a problem for artists to solve. Why? Because if words go down with the rest, and lose their light, we are really finished. Richard is doing what poets are asked to be doing now.--Fanny Howe

Frances Richards ANARCH. is a geology of linguistic quirks that recombine the gobbets of our world with clarity and mirth. Lines sound the certainties of science (rocks and processes 'drunk on the liquor of difficulty'), then playfully slip on neologistic terrain. Here, a poem is a hopeful structure, a plastic flow of solids set into motion by a subatomic rhizome of intraquarky layers. ANARCH. is a serious pleasure.--Jena Osman

The thoughts which are occasionally called forth in ANARCH. are such as could only be produced by an imagination in the highest degree fervid and active, to which materials were supplied by incessant study and unlimited curiosity. The heat of Richard's mind might be said to sublimate her learning, to throw off into her work the spirit of science, mingled with its grosser parts.--Lytle Shaw