"With the publication of his award-winning volumes, Anxious Latitudes, Neither World, and Twice Removed, Ralph Angel has won the admiration of readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Angel's poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. Now, in Ralph Angel's Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us even closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime. As Mark Doty has written, "These are the poems of a casual, down-to-earth philosopher who's been spun around and turned inside out by loss, by the desolation of life in the late [and early] hours of the century. ... Angel's poems are stamped indelibly with the mark of a unique, shaping imagination, and they're fresh with news of how it feels to live right now. He creates himself and his poems' characters, strange people in a strangely familiar place. We recognize them, of course, as well we might since they are ourselves and the city where they live is ours."--Publisher's website.

Poems, said Robert Lowell, should be events, not records of events. The poems of Twice Removed are events, set in the "bright between," that place between short days and long shadows, between past and future, between the inviolate self and the public person. In this third collection, Angel writes the arias of our subtext, provoking in the reader the recognition of longings just beyond reach of articulation. And though his poems are addressed to complexity, the language is not obscure: Angel's intense, visionary lyricism arrives in a seamless weave of elegance and streetwise savvy, the cadences somehow hypnotic and urgent at once. This is a poet with the audacity to push the very limits of the American idiom in order to say things that could not previously be said, using sounds not previously heard. Ralph Angel stands as an American original, and Twice Removed is a book that will expand his already large and passionate audience of readers. Ralph Angel is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Neither World , which received the 1995 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and Anxious Latitudes , which was published in the Wesleyan University Press New Poets Series. His work has been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, New American Poets of the '90s , and Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature . His most recent honors include a Pushcart Prize and awards from the Fulbright Foundation, Poetry magazine, and the Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain. Originally from Seattle, Mr. Angel now lives in Los Angeles.

Since the publication of his marvelous debut volume, Anxious Latitudes, Ralph Angel has been admired by readers of contemporary poetry for the extraordinary abstract lyricism of his poems. There is a superb grace, a speculative intelligence, and a wry philosophical wisdom to Ralph Angel's poetry. There are few poets so accomplished at creating an elegant yet innovative and provocative voice. His poetic phrasings recall the startling and original jazz voicings of a whole generation of great musicians, from Billie Holiday to Miles Davis, and it is within this profoundly American tradition of the voice of the outsider that his poetry continues to resonate. Now, in Ralph Angel's new collection, Neither World, we find ourselves again in the presence of poetry that will move us ever closer to a new and renewed promise of the American sublime.