Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything: Poems

Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets

by Jan Richman

Winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Robert Pinsky was the judge of the 1994 competition. Paper edition (unseen), $8.95. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Poetry

48 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1995

About the author

My collection of poems, Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets (judged by Robert Pinsky) and was published by Louisiana State University Press in 1995. My novel Thrill-Bent was published by Tupelo Press in 2012. I have received an NEA Grant in Literature and my writing has been published in many periodicals, including the Kenyon Review, The Nation, and Ploughshares, as well as several anthologies. I received my MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. I live in San Francisco, and am currently shopping my manuscript, a comic novel called Free Ms. Greene, loosely based on a bizarre experience teaching at the Academy of Art in SF.

Reviews

[Kasandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

With a blurb from Robert Pinsky, judge of the '94 Walt Whitman Award (Ms. Richman won), I figured I'd like these. Well, 3 of them spoke to me (History; Rockabye; Cancer, My Mother's Face), but mostly they seemed distanced from the audience, so "hip" and angry and angled that I felt put off instead of invited to read. They are crafted well, and lots of language play ensues, which I enjoyed, but the poems themselves were too frequently disjointed, and though often surprising as a result, they just didn't hang together for me enough to want to re-read any of them but the three listed above.