FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“[Rector's] third book in 20 years is mature and confident almost to the point of swaggering. In sometimes prose-like, sometimes musical tercets, Rector spits bile at a culture in decline and recounts his wild hippie days, taking outgrown ideals to task.… There are a number of standouts, especially 'Now,' in which an entire life is cynically, but movingly, compressed into just over four pages: '…a few years/ To play around while being/ Bossed around.' The reward is hard-nosed humility and gratitude after surviving failed marriages and nearly terminal cancer, which 'gave this to me: being/ Able to sit, comfortably.' ”
Publishers Weekly

The Executive Director of the Fallen World
LIAM RECTOR

America—you are on notice. Liam Rector has little patience for "sincere" poetry, spin-doctored politicos, or moral hot air of any kind. The titles of these poems could easily serve as their own warning labels: those with clinical depression or easily triggered violent tendencies should use with caution.

The Executive Director of the Fallen World is fearless and forthright, just the sort of blunt reality check that is missing from so much of contemporary, over-stylized poetry. Rector's stoicism and slightly murderous sense of humor pervade these poems as he doffs his hat to humility and audacity, taking on America, money, movement, marriages, and general cultural mayhem. The characters and voices in Rector's poems are, by tragic turns, unflinching, clearly and cleanly bitter, sarcastically East Coast, and lyrical.

As the former executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and a spirited First Amendment advocate who has sparred on screen with Bill O'Reilly, Liam Rector knows whereof he speaks in The Executive Director of the Fallen World.

Liam Rector is founder and director of the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

 

“Liam Rector is one of the most linguistically liquid and gifted poets of his generation. His is the oddest and most hallucinatory romance with Romance in American letters. By and by, we have waited the long while of a decade for Rector's third book of poems—and this is a book well worth the wait.”
Lucie Brock-Broido

“On easy terms with death, these poems pulsate with life and make me happy. For here is a voice that renders death, sickness, loss—the fallen of Liam Rector's world—tolerable, even lovable, even funny.… The voice is America: laconic, humorous, resigned to our passing lifespan, and, as Eliot once said, there's a different rhythm in the blood. ”
Lyndall Gordon

“These poems perplex with their stunned forthrightness, as if the poet had suffered all, as if he alone had escaped to tell and now recognizes the obscene irony of the privilege—that he, he, should be the one.”
Sven Birkerts

Liam Rector is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Stephanie Hlywak at (773) 702-0376 or sxh@press.uchicago.edu