Columbus poet Thomas Richardson’s first full-length collection “How to Read” has been released by independent press Friendly City Books. The book received praise from poets C. T. Salazar, the winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters’ 2020 Poetry Award, and Jacqueline Allen Trimble, the winner of the 2017 Balcones Poetry Prize, among others.
A virtual event with Richardson is scheduled for Tuesday, May 11, at 5:30 p.m. CT on Zoom. The author will be available for virtual events, as well as in-person readings and signings in the Southeast region during summer 2021.
“How to Read” (ISBN: 978-0-578-87140-0) is a trade paperback original that will retail for $16.95 and will be available retail via Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org, and wholesale via Ingram. It includes two dozen previously unpublished poems, in addition to 25 poems that have appeared in Cantos, Deep South Magazine, Intégrité, and POMPA. Review copies can be requested by contacting Friendly City Books at [email protected].
About the author
Thomas Richardson is currently an English instructor at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science, which boasts the No. 1 public high school faculty in the nation, according to NICHE.com. Born in Raleigh, North Carolina, and raised in Columbus, Richardson earned a bachelor’s degree from Millsaps College, a master’s degree in theological studies from Vanderbilt University, and an M.A. in teaching and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. He has served as an editor for Ponder Review and Dirty Paws Poetry Review. He lives in Columbus with his wife Hillary and son Emmett. His website is thomasbrichardson.com.
Praise for “How to Read”
“In the opening poem of How to Read, the speaker expresses the desire to ‘build a poem from an earthquake.’ Thomas Richardson fulfills that mission with this debut collection which is filled with poems that startle, shake and delight. Richardson is a master at wordplay and juxtaposition, combining theodicy and thunderstorms or biology class and first love in ways that are seamless, evocative and illuminating. These poems, as the best poetry always does, show us how to read the in-between spaces of human experience by paying attention. Here is a poet who understands the miraculous beauty and wisdom of everyday life,” said Jacqueline Allen Trimble, American Happiness (New South Press), Winner of the 2017 Balcones Poetry Prize
“Thomas Richardson’s How To Read is a bower of truth nestled within the bewilderments of the South. Where the poet is confronted — ‘Tell us about Mississippi; we have to know’ — you can expect wit, joy, and deep attention to the South’s past and present. Richardson’s gift for having us reconsider our home and our place within it makes “How To Read” the ambitious testament Mississippi needs,” remarked C. T. Salazar, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking (Acre Press), Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2020 Poetry Award.
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