Praise for Bilateral Asymmetry
“That
someone
could write
so many sonnets is not a
surprise. That
someone could
write so many good,
witty, poignant,
thoughtful, alert sonnets, page after page of
them, as Don Riggs does,
is amazing. Paintings, boy
scouts, temporary cats, different kinds of nakedness, house
flies, tarot readings and memories
of the poet’s father are a few of the
dozens of subjects that motivate these
emotionally-complex poems which are
much more than mere formal display.
The drawings are sly charmers. This
book is a delight, and an event.
”
— Daisy Fried
“Don Riggs is a master of the line – in his poetry, there are usually fourteen of them; in his drawings,
often fewer. In both cases, they are wonderfully expressive of his unique and dispassionate view of the
world around him.”
—John Langdon, author of Wordplay, and creator
of the ambigrams
in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons
“Here is a dazzling new collection of poems by Don Riggs, a poet of wit and elegance, who
shares his broad learning and love of thought in a most companionable manner. These
lyrics delight with meditations on art, the tarot deck, language, the body, and, most of
all, on the connected and isolated self. A speaker dreams of his lost spectacles, a
grasshopper learns its limits in a jar, the bodies of lovers entwine in ‘a warm
handshake.’ And, as if the poems did not offer pleasure enough, Riggs's own
whimsical line drawings add another layer of charm.”
—Lynn Levin, author of Miss Plastique
and Fair Creatures of an Hour
“Riggs is a poet for the ages. Unattached to any trend or movement, with
no need to obscure or impress, he is quite simply a genius. The humor,
lyricism, and humanity of his poems make them delicious to read and
profound to contemplate. This book will live – and not just for its
marvelous writing but for the sketches that capture the Riggsian
sensibility in all its simplicity and whimsy.
”
— Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Jane Austen in
Scarsdale
and What Alice Knew
“With a real vocation and a deep motivation, Donald
Riggs is a skillful conjurer of words and he is able to
put the mark of his own personality in his verses... Generally, Don Riggs writes a poetry characterized
by tenderness, grace, humor, including moments
of gentle reflexivity on what is ephemeral (or
not) in this existence, on youth and advancing age, health and illness, etc., but also a
poetry well directed by a connoisseur in
matters of creation.”
— Daniel Dragomirescu,
editor of Orizont Literar
Contemporan
Don Riggs has been writing and drawing since the 6th grade. Over the years he has gone through a number of stylistic evolutions. In three previously published chapbooks (as in Bilateral Asymmetry) he integrates drawing and words.
All of the drawings in this book were done by Don Riggs, but several were copied from or in the style of: George Perez, Neal Adams, Saul Steinberg, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Robert M. Place, the Waite-Rider Tarot deck, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Boris Vallejo, M.C. Escher, Leonard Baskin, and anonymous engravers in 17th-century alchemical texts.