One of our six Pushcart nominations, Ocean Vuong’s “Self-Portrait with Exit Wounds,” has won a Pushcart Prize and will be featured in the next Pushcart anthology. The poem first appeared in ASSARACUS ISSUE 08. Congratulations, Ocean!
Butcher’s Sugar by Brad Richard
“Perhaps one turns to Christ or the pagan gods as an escape from the abject real of the body’s stench. Perhaps to make love to a man is to always make love to the boy hidden underneath, forgotten. This need to both adore and kill what we no longer recognize within ourselves. Our bodies broken into, publicly shamed. Unmask the centurions, the butchers, and perhaps you’d instantly recognize their faces, Brad Richard suggests, if only you had his eyes to see.”
—Timothy Liu on Butcher’s Sugar
Butcher’s Sugar
Brad Richard
Featuring Cover Art by Jason Watson
$14.95; 72 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-937420-25-3
Publication Date: October 16, 2012
Now Available!
The Book. With a beauty purged of sweetness, the voices of Butcher’s Sugar sing of the sublime in the debased, violence and desire, the truth of whatever is “rank with the carcass of mystery.” Moving from childhood through adulthood, these poems re-inhabit and reclaim myths about the body and the self.
The Poet. Brad Richard is chair of the creative writing program at Lusher Charter High School in New Orleans. A native of Texas and Louisiana, he received his B.A. from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis. He has published two other books of poems—Habitations (Portals Press, 2000) and Motion Studies (The Word Works, 2011—Winner of the 2010 Washington Prize, finalist for the 2011 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from The Publishing Triangle)—and two chapbooks, The Men in the Dark (Lowlands Press, 2004) and Curtain Optional (Press Street Press, 2011). Richard is the 2002 poetry winner in the Poets & Writers, Inc., Writers Exchange competition, and his work has appeared in a wide range of journals, including American Letters & Commentary, Barrow Street, Bayou, ConnotationPress.com, Hunger Mountain, The Iowa Review, Laurel Review, Literary Imagination, The Massachusetts Review, Mississippi Review, New Orleans Review, North American Review, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Sakura Review, Satellite, Western Humanities Review, Willow Springs, and Witness.
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Very excited about this! Do you guys maybe have a tentative date for when we can start pre-ordering? Sorry to be so pushy. The internet has just made me very bad at waiting patiently.
Pre-orders will begin in on September 4th.