Wise Poison

In his first collection, Torque, David Rivard proved that he had a storyteller's ear and an eye for gritty detail. In Wise Poison, winner of the 1996 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, Rivard relies less on setting or personae, more on his own delicate wit and sheer poetic nerve (in consecutive poems, he steals titles from Baudelaire and the country-western great Merle Travis). The gamble pays off. With this collection, Rivard has come into a truly American voice, at once eccentric and universal.