Peabody’s literary influences, including strands of Punk, Beat, Alt, experimental, feminist, and political protest, blend with the purely lyrical to create a body of work that is both profound and pleasing. Whether addressing fatherhood, unjust wars, unrequited love, or suburban malaise, Peabody delivers, with both freshness and gravitas, important information about life as we live it now.
Peabody will read a sample of his writing and then take questions about his latest work, his writing process, his experience as the publisher of Gargoyle Magazine and Paycock Press … or whatever else participants would like to know about his career.
Few write with as much brilliance and variety as Richard Peabody. Spanning nearly forty years, The Richard Peabody Reader offers us a buffet of Peabody’s poetry and prose from 1976 to the present that includes nostalgia, tragedy, despair, wit, surrealism, sex, and even science-fiction. This is an immensely entertaining collection of decades of work by a writer whose powers never lag and whose creativity seems to know no limits.
—Mary Mackey, author of The Dear Dance of Eros and The Last Warrior Queen
I’m in Love with the Morton Salt Girl
I’m in love with the Morton Salt girl.
I want to pour salt in her hair and watch
her dance. I want to walk with her through the
salt rain and pretend that it is water. I want to
get lost in the Washington Cathedral and follow her
salt trail to freedom.
I want to discover her salt lick in the forests of Virginia.
I want to stand in line for hours to see her walk on in
the middle of a movie only to have the film break and watch salt
pour out and flood the aisles. I want to sit in an empty theater
up to my eyeballs in salt and dream of her.
When I go home she will be waiting for me in her white dress
and I will drink salt water and lose my bad dreams.
I will seek the blindness of salt, salt down my wounds,
hang like a side of ham over the curtain rod in the bathroom
and let her pour salt directly on my body.
When she is done I will lick her salty lips with my tongue
and walk her down the stairs into the rain, wishing that I
could grow gills and bathe in her vast salt seas.
–Richard Peabody, from The Richard Peabody Reader, published in 2015 by Alan Squire Publishing
Hear Richard Peabody read from his work: https://alansquirepublishing.com/book-authors/richard-peabody
