James Richardson

James Richardson’s books include By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), which was a 2010 National Book Award finalist and a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2010”; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Ausable Press, 2004), which was a finalist for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award; Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays(e.g. “All work is the avoidance of harder work,” “You’ve never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said”); How Things Are; As If;Second Guesses; Reservations, which was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, and two critical studies,Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity andVanishing Lives: Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats. Richardson is the recipient of the 2011 Jackson Poetry Prize, a 2002 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Robert H. Winner, Cecil Hemley, and Emily Dickinson Awards of the Poetry Society of America. He has recent poems and aphorisms in Slate, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry Daily, Yale Review, David Lehman’s Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present, Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists, two Pushcart Prize anthologies and five editions of The Best American Poetry, as well as talks and essays on Elizabeth Bishop, Linda Gregg, Philip Larkin, James Merrill, W. S. Merwin, Robert Browning, Mona Van Duyn, proverbs and aphorisms, dead lady poems, and how the brain dreams and reads.