RIKA LESSER is the author of three earlier collections of poetry, Etruscan Things (Braziller, 1983), All We Need of Hell (North Texas, 1995), and Growing Back (South Carolina, 1997). She has translated and published collections of poetry by Göran Sonnevi, Gunnar Ekelöf, and Claes Andersson, as well as Rainer Maria Rilke and Hermann Hesse (including Siddhartha: An Indic Poem, Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007). She has been the recipient of the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Translation Prize of the Swedish Academy.
Richard Howard on Rika Lesser’s work:
…This time, and in a very different place, the poet ventures upon a much more perilous dig, framing an archeology of the self which requires not only testimony but evidence, not only comment but construction. She disinters along "boundaries of pain" which Dickinson, her surest mentor, identifies as "capacious as the sea." Great accuracy and great tenacity were required to write these poems, in which a significant amount of going under is…undergone. Readers, as well as the writer, must "in the destructive element immerse"; but by trusting Lesser’s method (relentless questioning, dogged reversion to the charge, ironic skepticism as the prolegomenon to any future therapeutics) even as she follows her great predecessor in evidential texts, we ascend with her into radiance…
