"Rika Lesser, through these somberly glowing meditations, has brought a whole world—its gods, artifacts, plunderers—to language and to life."—James Merrill
"We discover the dire, fastidious significance of Rika Lesser’s poems, which are of course a meditation on what happens to the open secret of her life, what becomes of now; we discover, in so many Etruscan things taken out of their Etruscan places, that the past pollutes AND saves."—Richard Howard
About the Author
Rika Lesser is the author of three earlier collections of poetry, Etruscan Things (1983), All We Need of Hell (1995), and Growing Back (1997). She has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy.
September 2010