The Error of Nostalgia

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The poems in The Error of Nostalgia explore the relationships between individuals and their natural and urban environments in the American South and South America. These disparate locations serve as sites where, among other things, humans confront the perils of natural catastrophes, expatriation, urbanization, and crises of identity.

“Richard Boada’s brilliant and self-torn poems mediate nature and the urbane. Their economies chafe, rousing teargas and vulcanism. They are not nostalgia, but ‘lucidities that appear when one goes home,’ ‘evidence of who we are.’”
—Angela Ball

“The poems in Richard Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia are quick and tactile, moving through landscapes and histories with the speed of fresh recognition, what Brodsky called the ‘accelerated thinking’ of poetry.”
—Jesse Graves
author, Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

“These poems brim with sonic lushness, with musicality, and with a delicacy that reminds me of James Wright and Louise Glück. However, Boada’s poetry is his own: complex, pulsing, curious, and always surprising.”
—William Wright
author, Night Field Anecdote and Bledsoe

About the Author

RICHARD BOADA teaches writing at Misericordia University in Pennsylvania. His chapbook Archipelago Sinking was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters 2012 Poetry Award, and his poems have appeared in RHINO, Crab Orchard Review, Yalobusha Review, and The Louisville Review among others. The Error of Nostalgia is his first full-length collection.

Reviews

“Richard Boada’s brilliant and self-torn poems mediate nature and the urbane. Their economic chafe, rousing teargas and vulcanism. Tailored to unstable continents, they are ‘a corps de ballet,’ ‘strange and elegant’; an ‘engagement to marry’; a long and dreamy day at the races: tumultuous, violent, and pressed with color. They are not nostalgia, but ‘lucidities that appear when one goes home,’ evidence of who we are.’”
—Angela Ball

“The taut poems of Richard Boada’s first book bring vividly to life a childhood spent in Ecuador, an adulthood in the southern United States. The Error of Nostalgia moves with ease between human and other-than-human worlds: starfish on a beach at dawn; ‘sows hooked on the walls of the barn’ in hog killing weather; strikers whose brooms and sticks beat on the doors of a mother’s car as ash falls from the sky and clouds pace over Quito; lovers who ‘come, / hands pressing firmly on the drywall, / irremovable prints on once / polar-white paint.’ Clear-eyed, attentive, unspooked by darkness, like the strung-out girl in ‘Mississippi Winter,’ Richard Boada’s work ‘burns as [it] closes in / on what’s left of [its] own debris.”
—Ann Fisher-Wirth

“The poems in Richard Boada’s The Error of Nostalgia are quick and tactile, moving through landscapes and histories with the speed of fresh recognition, what Brodsky called the “accelerated thinking” of poetry. Here is language infused with a passionate accuracy, and technically very fine, filled with ambitious word choices and surprising enjambments that often startle with their aptness. Like the women in ‘La Plaza Mayor,’ Boada’s poem render the gravity of their situations, ‘calling out what they carry, / like prayers of their situations.’ What they carry is an intensely searching vision, and what they deserve is our careful readership.”
—Jesse Graves

“At once cosmic and visceral, Richard Boada’s debut full-length poetry collection, The Error of Nostalgia, introduces an important new voice to American Poetry. These poems brim with sonic lushness, with musicality, and with a delicacy that reminds me of James Wright and Louise Glück. However, Boada’s poetry is his own: complex, pulsing, curious, and always surprising.”
—William Wright

Published by Texas Review Press

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The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume III: Contemporary Appalachia (2nd Edition)