The Anguish and Vigilance of Things by Richard Ali - Paperback

The Anguish and Vigilance of Things is Richard Ali’s long-awaited debut. The collection deals with a range of ideas and issues, playing with form and structure. At the center of them, all is the image of a poet in a penultimate space, at an angle to the stairs of this world in the sense of James Baldwin.

In these poems, Richard Ali presents his life as a patient on a surgeon’s table and there are no, have been no themes, to his life, as these poems reveal. There have been only a series of glances, his eye resting on this or that, his poems becoming points of emphasis, seeking to undress and pare away adjective and lie alike.