Chair in the Desert [signed] [first edition]

The season is late summer. The cities are Philadelphia and Jerusalem. The wildernesses are desert and mountain. The voices are those of a man and a woman on paths where God and demons are at strife, on public beaches and city streets, in therapists’ offices and synagogues, in the Jersey Pine Barrens and at the Western Wall, at klezmer concerts and supermarkets, on boulevards, and in backyards and beds. Lament, lure, confession, enjoinder, boast, prayer, plea—the poems in Richard Chess’s Chair in the Desert pick up where he left off in Tekiah, his first book. These new poems invite us to rise and tremble in the presence of the new day and to make of our midnight wrestling and restlessness a psalm.