The Suburb of Long Suffering

The Suburb of Long Suffering, which includes the novella-length title prose poem and Rick Newby’s celebrated essay, "Bookmen on the Montana Frontier," is—in the words of poet Roger Dunsmore—"the book of an erudite barbarian who tells us ‘solitude is a savage word.’" Poet and essayist Sandra Alcosser writes that Newby is himself a bookman "schooled . . . on exquisite passages from his father’s naturalist journals, as well as the sacred texts of Borges, Sartre, Milosz, Confucius, and Colette." The Suburb of Long Suffering, Alcosser adds, "has a protean narrator with a gift for paradox in both composition and observation. The teeth of a squirrel / are sharp, and its nest / a thing of beauty." And author and publisher Nick Lyons notes, "Rick Newby is terrific—with a shrewd eye, a truly original vision, and a delicious capacity to ‘yoke’ very disparate images." Novelist and poet Melissa Kwasny called Newby’s previous collection of poems, Old Friends Walking in the Mountains (also published by Bedrock) "a collage of sensual pleasures and play," and poet William Pitt Root found in Newby’s first book of poems, A Radiant Map of the World, "rich evidence of curiosity in the service of an intelligence eager to probe what is unstinting in human nature and equipped to report the findings memorably." Besides his three collections of poems, Newby has published nine other books, either as author or editor. These range from Walking San Francisco, written with his wife Liz Gans, to Writing Montana: Literature under the Big Sky, co-edited with Suzanne Hunger. He also edited the rollicking Western novel, A Most Desperate Situation: Frontier Adventures of a Young Scout, 1858–1864, by Montana pioneer Walter Cooper (illustrations by Charles M. Russell).