Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right by Jim Richards

Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right is a book of mid-journey, midlife, of being a son and father, exiled from childhood, reckoning with maturity. With his cunning wit and keen ear, Jim Richards tunes us to the music of mortality.

–Edward Hirsch

William Wordsworth once wrote, “Child is father of the man,” a paradox that could aptly serve as epigraph to this lovely and brave debut collection, Song for My Left Ear, Song for My Right. We’re stuck in time, Jim Richards reminds us, and our task is to feel our way forward with grace. These poems lament and celebrate, whisper and sing. Above all, they remind us what it’s like to inhabit a body of clay and how to praise this messy, delicious life as we share it with others.

–Lance Larsen

Jim Richards’ poems at once desire understanding and honor what exceeds it. They resist bureaucratic attempts to measure our lives—and reveal that even when we try to shut out beauty, it “tries to creep back in.” In sincere, beautiful ruminations on the distances between fathers and sons, to more surreal poems where Emily Dickinson materializes on a ballfield or Guttenberg lunches at Chipotle, these poems allow the mundane and miraculous to rub elbows. While “the problem with understanding is that it never happens”—Richards’ poems still illuminate, reminding us that “from darkness, one must close one’s eyes to enter a great light.”

–Bethany Schultz Hurst