Excerpt from I Think of Our Lives: Report from the National Commission Paper cuffs frilled their chops and they relished the sluggish sauce in the gravy boats. They adored statues of gold, jewels chased into precious metals. They jeered envoys returning from sacred missions. They ignored God, who set fire to clouds, suspended the sun, who forbid them to be zealots of ease. But they practiced evasions with cunning prayers, palliative charities, oblations of waxed fruits, perforated doilies, samplers, amulets, plaques.
We had to learn to step over their bodies, not to falter, not to take pity, not to look back...
Review: "Fein's human and heartbreaking poetry gives us the power of the voice in an epoch of emaciated writing."
-David Shapiro
"So lucid, so humane, so able to go from the homey mundane world of a Pyrex bowl full of Jell-O, or the stacked steel piping at Manny's Hardware Store, to the world of ancestral voices and Biblical splendors and dream visions..."
-Albert Goldbarth
"A wonderful book, pungent and fully realized. It's remarkably true to life, but then it seems truer to life than life is, because of the focus and concentration of its gaze and the control with which its very free verse is handled, making everything so vivid and giving its truth such authority."
-David Ferry
"A feast of good language and penetrating perceptions?attains a unity of consciousness and intimacy few if any American poets have been able to achieve."
-Edwin Honig
Bio: RICHARD FEIN's poetry, translations, articles and reviews have appeared in many journals. His books include the poetry collections, Ice Like Morsels and To Move into the House, a critical study, Robert Lowell, and a memoir, The Dance of Leah. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
