About the Author

Richard Jarrette is author of Beso the Donkey (Michigan State University Press, 2010)—Gold Medal winner for Poetry Midwest Independent Publishers Association 2011, A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances (Green Writers Press, 2015), The Beatitudes of Ekaterina (Green Writers Press, 2017). He is Poetry Columnist for VOICE Magazine of Santa Barbara and his books have been endorsed by W.S.Merwin, Jane Hirshfield, Joseph Stroud, Sam Hamill, and others. He lives semi-reclusively in the Central Coast area of California and is far into his next poetry collection, It Is Never Finished, inspired by the ancient Chinese poets who named names, praised, and preserved.

Reviews

This profound, grave, and original book investigates all being, and all attention, through one scarred, silent, four-footed master of the pasture. Richard Jarrette's Beso will, I predict, take his place beside his fellow immortals--Jammes', Jimenez' and Nasruddin's own donkeys, E.B. White's pig, Christopher Smart's cat, Umberto Saba's goat...yet like any living creation, Beso stands also alone, unlike anything but himself. Simply and without reservation, from first page to last, I am entirely taken and altered by these spare, wise, hauntingly conceived, brilliantly crafted poems. -- Jane Hirshfield

Richard Jarrette's voice is unique. I don't know anyone writing in a manner similar to his. There are echoes of Merwin, Rumi, the Chinese, but the texture and tone are all his own. The poems that pre-date Beso the Donkey are building to the miracle of what he accomplished there. But these have their own delights and mysteries, their illuminations and wonder. There is so much richness in his vision and a sense of the sacred along with an accomplished grace that is rare to find these days. It is wonderful to enter these poems. -- Joseph Stroud, author of Of This World: New and Selected Poems

Richard Jarrette has once again raised the hairs on my neck and sent a shiver down my spine with his remarkable new poems. I am deeply moved by and grateful for his outstanding poetry. -- Sam Hamill, author of Habitation: Collected Poems and Crossing The Yellow River