M A R C
A N T H O N Y
R I C H A R D S O N
Forthcoming
THE
SERPENT
WILL EAT
WHATEVER IS IN
THE BELLY OF THE BEAST
(Dalkey Archive Press)
In The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, seven dissidents, victims of police violence, orchestrate a strange and insidious agenda, as pangs of conscience compel one of them to see beyond the self. Inspired by the "Seven Days" from Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, the book is a single-sentence, novelistic poem narrated by the dead, referring to each chapter's protagonist in the second person. With no beginning or end, like a serpent eating its tail, these theatrical character studies blend into each other, interspersed by the voices and the thoughts of each actor: you.
Excerpt forthcoming in
Conjunctions: 83: Revenants
Co-edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Bradford Morrow. Feature authors will include Margaret Atwood, Patricia Smith Can Xue, Paul Muldoon, and Peter Straub.
Recent Release
M E S S I A H S
(University of Alabama Press/FC2)
A fiercely ecstatic tale of betrayal and self-sacrifice
​
Messiahs centers on two nameless lovers, a woman of east Asian descent and a former state prisoner, a black man who volunteered incarceration on behalf of his falsely convicted nephew, yet was “exonerated” after more than two years on death row. In this dystopian America, one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform—“the proxy initiative,” patterned after the Passion.
​
The lovers begin their affair by exchanging letters, and after his release, they withdraw to a remote cabin during a torrential winter, haunted by their respective past tragedies. Savagely ostracized by her family for years, the woman is asked by her mother to take the proxy initiative for her brother—creating a conflict she cannot bear to share with her lover. Comprised of ten poetic paragraphs, Messiahs’ rigorous style and sustained intensity equals agony and ecstasy.
Messiahs is a fever dream of storytelling. It explores racism and interracial conflict, the deadly prison industrial complex, climate emergency, social death, and more in prose that unfurls like waves of sound. Bleak, though not without hope, challenging, though with numerous rewards along the way, innovative from start to finish, Messiahs is a marvel.
John Keene
National Book Award Winner
and MacArthur Fellow
​
Praise & Reviews
"Messiahs seems to take place in our dreams...It is a painfully told tale, fearless in its storytelling, in that it marries austerity with a sensuousness depicting lust, aloneness, and betrayal...The radical nature of the book is its shifting narrative, which meanders through minds, prisons, letters, and storms, fiercely navigating a society that is unnervingly similar to our own. It is as quiet and dramatic as silent cinema...It is like a wild plunge down an undammed river: sometimes there are peaceful, calm eddies, but rarely; the fever dream barely releases its grip through the rapids until you close the last page, and even then you dream of it for days."
​
American Book Review
Marc Anthony Richardson’s novel has a nightmare impact, a gathering heartbreak . . . Messiahs often upsets expectation, using its imaginative premise as more than a platform for critiquing our broken justice system . . . typical of the entire unfolding tapestry, a marvel of close stitching, with glimmers you feel in your spine.
The Brooklyn Rail
reviewed by John Domini
author of The Color Inside a Melon
EVENTS
MFA Writing Colloquium: Marc Anthony Richardson:
Sympathy for the Serpent: Empathy as Prose Poetry
​
Heimbold Visual Arts Center HEIM 202 Donnelley Film Theatre
Open to the public
September 11, 2024 / Wednesday
2:00pm-3:00pm
​
Fiction can encourage empathy without condoning violence. In this lecture, Marc Anthony Richardson will discuss humanizing "monsters" for strong creative writing and an honest understanding of ourselves, as well as read an excerpt from his forthcoming novel poem, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast. According to the Jungian concept of the shadow, "bad" qualities are often suppressed, and as Alan Watts stated, "To the degree that you condemn others, and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself." What are we pretending not to know? Labeling occurs out of confusion. But could the Sanskrit saying "tat tvam asi," or, that thou art, be true? In essence, could everyone be us? "The devil is the belief in duality," to quote Ernest Holmes, and, if this is the case, the monsters from Milton's Paradise Lost to Shelley's Frankenstein to the Gospel of Judas will continue to have something indispensable to teach us.
VISCERAL FICTION:
workshops offered
​
In my creative writing workshops, students are encouraged to transcend their reading and writing preferences to be apprenticed by avant-garde works of literature and film—aesthetic achievements centered around objective life, subjective reality, and ecstatic confession. I challenge students’ tendency towards self-censorship in a safe and supportive environment; weekly, we read aloud and write to develop our observational and listening skills in determining the effects of the spoken word. Most of the books or films that affect us deeply are the ones that might have wearied us or disturbed us. But in time, upon further reflection, we find them rather informative—or even illuminating!
​
​
Marc Anthony Richardson
Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award, and Messiahs. His forthcoming book, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, won a Creative Capital Award, a Sachs Program Grant for Arts Innovation, and an Artistic Practitioner Fellowship from Brown University's Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. He also received a PEN America grant, a Hurston/Wright Foundation fellowship, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Art Omi, and Rhodes University in South Africa. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.