Deborah Richards
Last One Out
ISBN 1-930068-21-2
$12.00

When Deborah Richards advises "use your imagination it has been cut," she refers to the place you were right before you entered this book. Where you are now, between the axis of the page and the axis of memory (for those who've viewed the films referred to herein) is eerie deconstruction. Richards' diagrammatic readings of some classics in American cinema engage those ever-present questions of race, identity, class, and culture with humor and chaos. Blowing apart the reading experience with boxes and columns that read both horizontally and vertically, and infusing each text with shadows and crevices from which retreat is impossible, Deborah Richards has created her own genre. Her own template, even. The page has become a screen, a stage, a disassembling. The way you exit this text will be created by the way you enter it. Take your time.

--Renee Gladman


Richards' work can seem more like an information map for the mind, like the insights recorded in a study guide we create for ourselves before an exam. She creates a form in which to record and relive the moment of insight. This is the freshness I find in Deborah Richards' poems. They are as immediate as the post-it note in place on the mind, on the idea. They even take on a bit of the emblematic as a photo of fast moveing, pressured thought.

--Ed Robeson