Larry Beckett is building up a body of work that will likely be remembered and beloved for centuries to come.

“I think that poetry is just part of human life—that for some reason, literature is spellbinding.

I don’t think it brings us closer to the heart of reality or that it helps us to escape, especially.

It’s an inscrutable, mysterious and absolutely necessary part of our lives.” - Larry Beckett

The books or, as Beckett calls them, “texts for performance,” are

extraordinary, sustained explosions of authentic American language and energy.

Each is entirely different from the others in style, voice, form and narrative content; each so rich in imagery and nuance and texture and event and so finely crafted that Beckett’s aspirations to be worthy of his “heroes,” Hopkins, Dickinson, Whitman and, of course, Shakespeare, seem far from unreasonable. One can imagine encountering these poems in school and being thrown for a loop by them:

confused, intimidated, and finally diving in and coming up in love with literature, language and the music that words can make. - Paul Williams