A Carnage in the Lovetrees

"Surely, all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end," said Rilke. A Carnage in the Lovetrees begins at the moment the speaker reaches this realization. He resolves then to rebuild a world caught in the crosshairs of repeated annihilation, regrounding love as the only viable stratagem for survival. Richard Greenfield’s sequence of poems searches for a way to live in the aftermath of private trauma and public disaster. It represents a struggle to reconcile the historical with the present and to find a language that allows the speaker to endure past calamities. These relentless, acrobatic, and self-aware poems resist settling for easy solutions, or even closure, but instead push toward the difficult compromise of the livable.

Greenfield Richard :

Richard Greenfield is a doctoral candidate in English & Creative Writing at the University of Denver. A graduate of the University of Montana's creative writing program, his work has appeared in Boston Review, Fourteen Hills, syllogism, and VOLT