An Alchemy in the Bones: Poems

'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. William Reichard's poems 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, author of Heaven's Coast: A Memoir