Strange Antlers

"Richard Jarrette combines erudition with profound simplicity and breathtaking beauty in Strange Antlers. He is a true disciple of the ancient masters, who can be heard and felt in these elegantly crafted poems full of poignancy and wisdom."

-Yun Wang, translator of Dreaming of Fallen Blossoms: Tune Poems of Su Dong-Po




"It is a glorious book and feels like it was written in a passion or a trance. I find it so powerful and poignant. I love the long titles that tell about his childhood and emotional state. They let me into the speaker in a way that matters to me. It is a magnificent work."

-Marsha de la O, author of Every Ravening Thing




"Friend and disciple to the more-than-slightly-intoxicated classical Chinese poets who fled court life to live in thatched huts, Richard Jarrette epitomizes many of their qualities: pungent and poignant imagery, and a Rip-Van-Winkle loneliness about the passage of time and relationships. But the precise juxtaposition of beautiful and terrible-'Boy reads by refinery flare stack light / taste of sulphur on condemned air'-is Jarrette's own marvelous signature."

-Patrick Donnelly, author of Little-Known Operas




Gazing into the abyss of perilous times, Jarrette turns to the master poets of the ages who formed his mind and ethics seeking guidance-Sappho to W. S. Merwin and particularly the classical Chinese. Strange Antlers weaves ancient and free verse forms into a startling conversation about the headlines and survival that remembers and seeks wisdom's way.




RICHARD JARRETTE is the author of Beso the Donkey (Michigan State University Press, 2010) Gold Medal Poetry Midwest Independent Publishers Association 2011, A Hundred Million Years of Nectar Dances (Green Writers Press, 2015), The Beatitudes of Ekaterina (Green Writers Press 2017), and The Pond (Green Writers Press, 2019).