All of This Candy Belongs to Me

All of This Candy Belongs to Me - poems I've paid attention to Rich Boucher's smart, plucky poems for a long time now. He'll gladly cop to any need, bust open the edges until "all the clocks stop what they are doing, in shock..." You think you know where a poem will go; you think it's silly or wild, but then, somewhere in the path of stacked words, it loops into the philosophical. He's not at all afraid to house the monsters of his mind-regret, loss, fear and pleasure. From desperation to joy, these poems radiate. Boucher will pull at every particle of your mind while he inches closer. Wherever he wants to go, he wants you with him: "Please come back / so we can fight again..." Lauren Camp, author of Turquoise Door, the Dorset Prize-winning One Hundred Hungers, and two earlier collections. She mentors writers of all ages and levels, and lives in New Mexico.To categorize Rich Boucher's poetry as surreal, brutalist, confessional, dystopian, absurdist, etc.would by no means be inaccurate, but it would certainly be banal. I would prefer to say that hehas mastered his native tongue to the extent that he can subvert English and its rules ofgrammar and syntax to his every poetic purpose, and that he is a dogged and savage critic ofthe deranged commercialism that menaces our very civilization - but although he frequentlyfinds himself engulfed by the vile smoke of corporatist delusion, he can still hold up anundefiled vision of the joy - and the redemption - that beauty and love may bring to even themost warped and jaded victims of our horrid version of "the great society." Arabella Bianco