Otherwise Elsewhere: Poems

The expansive, energetic new poetry book by David Rivard, author of Sugartown and Wise PoisonYou pay as you go. Mornings at this point are either like spread sails or (more likely) spread-sheets-they fill fast. Mornings are fortunes, but as suspect as a wristwatch running in reverse. -from "Vigorish" David Rivard's new collection Otherwise Elsewhere describes the many powers-psychological and historical-that flow through people's lives in acts of faith, greed, pleasure, celebrity, gossip, and consolation. A teenage boy looking at a weathered gravestone wonders how many times he'll sign his name in his life; the forest on the move in Macbeth intersects with a blind man cured by Christ; a man coming out of a terrible dream of being lost is saved by touching his wife's hair. "For those of us who need it," one poem asserts, "instruction is everywhere." Rivard's poetry is full of unsettling humor and the careening movement of memory and imagination.