Twice Removed: Poems

Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person.

In this third collection, Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers.

Ralph Angel is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Neither World, which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Anxious Latitudes, which was published in the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s, and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature. His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Originally from Seattle, Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles.