The Short Story of You and I

From long narrative lines to fine-boned, lyrical loops and ties that bind these poems into place, Richard James Allen has taken risks with language that mark this as his most adventurous and significant book to date. Anthony Lawrence

Allen’s subject is being itself, and the way our biological and mental dimensions interact, with human intelligence and love being the unifying forces for this interaction. Adam Aitken

This is a book full of hauntings, ruins, and after-effects. The perspective is philosophical and curious, habitually metapoetic, by turns panoramic and hyper-focused, and imbued with a quiet mysticism. Melinda Louise Smith

In philosophical poems grounded in the everyday, wide-ranging excursions from the physical into the metaphysical, Allen affirms life in the midst of hardship and in the mess of the quotidian uncovers epiphanies. Luke Fischer