Motion Studies

Poetry. Winner of the Washington Prize. Second edition, with foreword by Skye Jackson and new poems plus an afterword by the author.

In poems that relive the New Orleans catastrophe of Katrina, a century of losses incurred by the competing forces of weather, racial injustice, and complex family dynamics, Brad Richard conjures a unique journey through the human soul put to its greatest tests. Nicole Colley calls it "a book about vision, about what it truly means to see." And Mathew Dickman assures us that "From the broken spaces of our cities, bodies, and hearts, Brad Richard has come to mend."

Says Major Jackson: "The poems in Motion Studies steady our ears and ignite our imagination on the dazzling workings of language and verbal song. With superb intellect, Brad Richard draws a wondrous and discursive line between history and art, and along the way, brightens our bodies and hearts, as he says in one poem, to the fullness of each other and our cultural inheritances."