“Sleeping in Tall Grass is an outstanding first poetry collection…. In the opening long poem, ‘Nowhere in 
Sight,’ Therrien uses the physical experience of walking across the prairie as a metaphor for poetry while a walking rhythm sparks spiritual insight…. Sleeping in Tall Grass is a wise book, erudite and philosophical at times but foremost a spiritual and redemptive work.” [Full review] Volume 15, Issue 1, Gillian Harding-Russell, The Goose, Volume 15, Issue 1
“It’s a complex and multi-layered book, offering poems that are rooted in the prairie landscape, featuring a multitude of voices that speak to the familial, the historical, the philosophical and the mystical. Many of the poems are dark, weighted and at times exquisitely painful…. The personal stories he deconstructs show how the speaker submits, turns back to the land that begat him, until he sleeps in tall grass, until readers hear in ‘Envoy,’ the final poem, ‘a voice singing of its own forgetting.'” Anne Sorbie, Alberta Views
Short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the Alberta Book Awards, Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry.
Read Richard’s email he wrote to us after his Edmonton book launch.