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
(Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive Press)
In The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, seven vigilantes reciprocate the killing of blacks by white police officers by taking the lives of whites, according to the day of the week and in the manner that it happened. This surreal, novelistic poem takes place in the theatre of the mind and during a day of rioting, after the white rapist and murderer of a black girl is released from jail without charges, and "a reactionary angel" seeks retaliation.
Recent Release
M E S S I A H S
(FC2/University of Alabama Press)
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,
MacArthur Fellow, and author of Punks and Counternarratives
Praise & Reviews
In Messiahs, Marc Anthony Richardson gives us an innovative, intelligent, and insightful take on several American obsessions, including punishment, incarceration, and the death penalty. As much as this layered narrative presents a warning about things to come, it also offers a profound examination of rebirth, redemption, second acts. All in all an unnerving, uncanny, and challenging read on many levels, but well worth the effort.
Jeffery Renard Allen
Guggenheim Fellow and author of
Rails Under My Back and Song of the Shank
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.
John Domini
reviewer for The Brooklyn Rail and author of The Archeology of a Good Ragù and The Color Inside a Melon
Upcoming Appearances
Marc Anthony Richardson
Marc Anthony Richardson is the author of Messiahs and Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award and a Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. His forthcoming third novel, The Serpent Will Eat Whatever is in the Belly of the Beast, won a Creative Capital Award. He also received grants from PEN America and the Sachs Program, a fellowship from the Hurston/Wright foundation, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, Art Omi, and Rhodes University in South Africa. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.