Scorpio Rising

For more than twenty-five years Richard Katrovas has written some of the most powerful and compelling poetry in America...Whether reflecting upon his own checkered childhood, the political weathers of Prague, or the delicate nature of his daughters, Richard Katrovas carries us into landscapes of wisdom and beauty, and I promise that his poems will move you like few others.

David St. John

For the past thirty years, Richard Katrovas has been one of our most passionate, humane, and accomplished poets. He has meditated on tenderness and violence and knows the friction and resentments of class difference and the frustrations of the disenfranchised. Witness to major political events like Czechoslovakia's "Velvet Revolution," he also knows the dignity of the private individual struggling to assert his or her value. This selection of Richard Katrovas's poems, evidence of a unique voice, is a gift to American poetry.

Mark Jarman, author of Bone Fires: New and Selected Poems

I regard a world/That is beautiful/And rank, and couch what/I see in language/That is palpable/And rude," writes Katrovas in "The Book of Complaints," making an assertion characteristic in both its candor and modesty. I know of no other poet who has so scrupulously turned life into art without killing it; turned street-smart into book-smart without dulling it; turned the masculine passions of a son, a father, a husband, and a lover into exquisitely shaped lyric form without losing the ability to roar. Richard Katrovas is a powerful, thoughtful, and inventively romantic poet who never loses sight of the fact that we are alive inside the complexities of our historical moments; that we are members of a terrible and beautiful tribe. This book demonstrates beyond a doubt that he is one of the most accomplished and significant poets of our time.

Gail Wronsky