Rain Dance

Richard Broderick

In Rain Dance, the most recent chapbook from Parallel Press, poet Richard Broderick explores the idea of interconnectedness—and that without these connections, we are all lost. Rain Dance offers a probing examination of human nature and ultimately reveals that in the direst circumstances, an embrace of community offers us hope of redemption.

Richard Broderick is the author of Night Sale, a collection of short fiction, and Woman Lake, a collection of poetry, both from New Rivers Press. A recipient of a Minnesota Book Award, he is the former poetry editor of Minnesota Monthly and a finalist for the Robert Frost Foundation Award.

A review of Rain Dance appeared in the July 2011 issue of the Midwest Book Review‘s Internet Bookwatch: “Rain Dance presents new ways of looking at the world through many others’ eyes, and is highly recommended.”

A review of Rain Dance appeared in the online issue of Verse Wisconsin in fall 2011.

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Excerpt

African Students at the Community College

They linger in the central courtyard
after other students have retreated inside,
three young women, the midday heat
a reminder of Liberia, the brick planters
on which they sit hard as the sun-baked soil
back home. Their singsong voices carry to me
like water chuckling out of a standpipe.
Free for now from the nightmares
they write about in composition class,
everything about them is graceful,
the way they sweep aside invisible insects
from their shining faces, the way they
rock back and forth with laughter,
mocking in their mother tongue
the pretense of teachers who think they
know so much but really know so little.