William Reichard
Exquisitely tuned and deeply felt, William Reichard's Sin Eater cambers gracefully. From a gorgeous everydayness ('The curve of a crimson birch as it bends in the wind'), to desire for a seemingly ungraspable holiness ('It's in the sky, the desperate divination of clouds'), and reality expanded and woven with the metaphysical and erotic ('Having lost his spirit, given away / his flesh, what is left? Sometimes, / another man lives inside his body'), the poems are deftly contoured by 'the things that console us,' the 'little lights / in the darkness, a map of stars / bright as god, blinding.' The swelling heart of these poems is musical and haunting: Love and loss, family, doubt and faith, childhood pain and regret. Sin Eater is a magnificent book. It will have you stretching your 'hungry lips up to kiss / the drowsy old face of God.'"
Alex Lemon
William Reichard's Sin Eater prepares for us a feast of words, lays it lovingly around the body of beliefs inhabitants of a contemporary world must mourn, and invites us to partake. Master of the terrifying understatement, Reichard gives us poems that walk us calmly toward the empty shell and demonstrate the utter pointlessness of imagining that paradise is anywhere but in the smallest details of the here and now.
Leslie Adrienne Miller
The poems in Sin Eater often have at their center a disarming modesty. Their narrator may be standing at a kitchen sink doing dishes or sitting on a tiny patio listening to the neighbors on their stoops. But somehow the neighborhood becomes the world and the quietness becomes a protected space which makes room for the mystery and longing at the heart of these poems. William Reichard's poems begin by charming their readers and end by compelling them: it's an enchantment that makes Sin Eater a wonderful book.
Jim Moore
This "red, still-beating gift," Sin Eater by William Reichard, is neither his heart, nor his treatise on the soul, but something else entirely. If I were pressed, I would say it is a certainty, the edges of which he feels, and the whole of which, unbroken, he makes motion to convey. A certainty of what? It is a spirit that, as he says, travels by your side, by turns good and evil, the bad "worn thin as bird's bones, the good so filled with all they cannot say that they threaten to burst at the first gentle gesture a human hand might make."
Jesse Ball
This Brightness is as radiant as it is precise, rare not only in the generosity of its attentions, its resourcefulness in illuminating the strangely familiar, the domestic otherness of the near at hand, but also in its addiction to joy, even at its most heartbreaking, its affectionate take on a realm rendered with such economy, such grace, that it risks the most unabashed engagements without relaxing into the sentimental. However gripping or quiet the transformation, there is maturity of sensibility here, neither restrictive nor ostentatious, impoverished nor decadent, aloof not brash. Such is the sureness of the poet's imaginative care, his verbal reverence, the power of the personal clarified by modesty. A deeply restorative book.
Bruce Bond
Full of forgiveness and love, How To shows William Reichard taking on the work of the long haul - seeing clearly and then painting, steadily painting, with all of the luminous words he has at hand. I'm thankful for this poet who arranges the universe and then, in moments of tenderest compassion, willingly lets it go.
Mary Logue
“It’s about what can be bent,” William Reichard writes in a poem called “Bonsai.” These poems, too, are about the ways we’re bent by experience: by loss and by desire, by love and difficulty. The poems in An Alchemy in the Bones are beautifully open to the “bent” in all its senses: the not-straight, the damaged, the curves the world throws us. These delicately etched lyrics are attentive to what Reichard calls “the intricacy of emotion;” it doesn’t surprise, then, that this poet has a particular gift for the love poem, for the text of tenderness, the body’s “dazzling code.”
Mark Doty
Here William Reichard makes a splendid debut, with a volume of memories and predilections recounted in a voice always heartfelt, pensive, musical. Rare gift: he is interested in other people. The result is a poetry of generosity.
Wayne Koestenbaum
Bill Reichard belongs to the great American lyric tradition that includes Roethke and James Wright, though he writes with a contemporary edge all his own. I found An Alchemy in the Bones intensely moving from poem to poem, keen in its observations, brilliant in its language, and what is most exciting--utterly trustworthy in its emotional wisdom. “I’m making sense of the small things,” one of the gorgeous prose poems says disarmingly. But this collection marks a debut that is a very big deal indeed.
Patricia Hampl
