Neighbor Blood (Poems)

Richard Frost has published two books of poems (The Circus Villains and Getting Drunk with the Birds) with Ohio University Press. During the last forty years his poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Paris Review, Poetry, and many other journals. He has won the Poetry Society of America's Gustav Davidson Memorial Award and has held a CAPS fellowship and an NEA creative writing fellowship. Frost is a working jazz drummer and Professor of English at the State University College, Oneonta, New York.

"Frost, a jazz drummer and English professor, sets his first collection in 20 years in the world of visceral experience rather than abstract matter. . . . Frost's strengths lie in the hinges of his poems where the reader can feel the deep connections that motivate his work. . . . Frost's pithy, epigrammatic style finds strength in silences as well as words."-Publishers Weekly

"In Richard Frost's long awaited third book, he recreates a world as if revived from memory . . . where humor and violence intersect in the daily intimacies of living, sometimes leading to the horrific, often leading to the miraculous."-Salt Hill Journal

"I am very fond of Mr. Frost's poems," writes Donald Justice of [Frost's] latest collection, "and especially of those that have a story to tell, which they manage to do with enviable clarity and a total lack of pretension. They can be poignant and scary; also funny. They are certainly very human. Nor should it be held against them-unusual though the case may be-that these are poems one can actually enjoy.'"-American Poet

"For those who still believe that poetry can discover truth and illuminate experience, Neighbor Blood will come as a rare comfort and pleasure."-The Marlboro Review

"These are poems that can help us to understand our human lives. . . . Frost is a remarkable poet, a storyteller of colloquial surety who greets the reader with respect and intimacy. . . ."-Controlled Burn

"Frost loves language, delighting in every twist it affords. You can see it in these poems, in the music and rhythm of their lines, and even in their subject matter. . . . Frost is a working jazz drummer, and he writes about it, and about a few