The third and final collection from the late founder and director of the Bennington Graduate Writing Seminars, this is one of the finest books of poetry published in the past decade. Full disclosure: I was a student of Liam's at Bennington and I know I wouldn't be the poet I am today without his guidance. Liam is a master of the line and the tercet (favored by William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens at the end of their lives) and is sentimental about the past without being sappy, optimistic about the future but always cutting that optimism with the stark reality of our current conditions as living, loving human beings. It's ironic that such a self-admitted atheist/agnostic poet should hold T.S. Eliot as his favorite! But Rector is about the great American condition: contradiction (think: Whitman). One should take note that the "I" of these poems is not always the poet himself; yet one can't help but read the autobiography behind poems like "Ronald Beaver's Life in England" and "Back to Country with Pulitzer". His poem "Now" is one of the most heartbreaking and hopeful poems you will ever read.

The Worry of the Far Right
The Reverend Donald Wildmon, executive director
Of the American Family Association in Tupelo,
Mississippi, birthplace of Elvis Presley, he who
 
Unleashed the libido of a generation, announced today
That he, the Reverend, wanted again an America
In which he could drive his convertible into town,
 
Park it, leave his keys in the ignition,
And worry only that it might rain,
Rather than worry about Liam Rector.
 America—you are on notice. Liam Rector has little patience for “sincere” poetry, spin-doctored politicos, or moral hot air of any kind. The titles of these poems could easily serve as their own warning labels: those with clinical depression or easily triggered violent tendencies should use with caution. 

The Executive Director of the Fallen World is fearless and forthright, just the sort of blunt reality check that is missing from so much of contemporary, over-stylized poetry. Rector’s stoicism and slightly murderous sense of humor pervade these poems as he doffs his hat to humility and audacity, taking on America, money, movement, marriages, and general cultural mayhem. The characters and voices in Rector’s poems are, by tragic turns, unflinching, clearly and cleanly bitter, sarcastically East Coast, and lyrical.  Writing in tercets throughout, the poet breathes new life into this classic form with skill that might just send some unsuspecting readers over the edge. 

As the former executive director of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and a spirited First Amendment advocate who has sparred on screen with Bill O’Reilly, Liam Rector knows whereof he speaks in The Executive Director of the Fallen World.

Acknowledgments, xi
In My Memory Eddie
Now
Back to Country with Pulitzer
Song Years  
In Memoriam: (Harriet)
Sarcastic Caustic Ironic Satiric Sardonic Funny: Wounding Poetry
Disgust
When the Parents Went
Mental Mommy
The One at the Oars
Family Plot
Your Tales of the Suburbs
Handmade Shoes
The Worry of the Far Right
Who’s in Charge of the Culture Now?
One for the Guys and for Robert DeNiro
Corner Man
Jack Warden
Larkin
Third Star with Guggenheim
Woman in the Summer Southern Night
Fat Southern Men in Summer Suits
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
San Francisco 1970, Years After the Summer of Love
Best Friend
Peyote
The Old Man and the Motorcycle
About the Money
Ronald Beaver’s Life in England
I Get a Feeling
Off to the Country of Cancer
This Summer
First Marriage
Beautiful, Sane Women
Ever Upon the Gad
Our Last Period Together
The Cruel Numbers of Love
So We’ll Go No More
Cold and Soon
Always
Soon the City
 

"[Rector''s] third book in 20 years is mature and confident almost to the point of swaggering. In sometimes prose-like, sometimes musical tercets, Rector spits bile at a culture in decline . . . . There are a number of standouts, especially ''Now,'' in which an entire life is cynically, but movingly, compressed into just over four pages: ''... a few years/ To play around while being/ Bossed around.'' The reward is hard-nosed humility and gratitude after surviving failed marriages and nearly terminal cancer, which ''gave this to me: being/ Able to sit, comfortably.''"—Publishers Weekly

"Liam Rector''s new book, The Executive Director of the Fallen World , expresses a stringent yet generous tone toward the profane, ignoble world of his title. Without necessarily forgiving himself or the rest of greedy and needy humanity, Rector chooses instead a dry, somewhat charitable acknowledgment that the world is . . . worldly."—Robert Pinsky, "Poet''s Choice," Washington Post Book World

"Defiant to the last, mordantly funny, humane, and loving."

"Poet, educator, and founding director of Bennington College’s Graduate Writing Seminars, Liam Rector died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound last August. In recent years, Rector had been successfully treated for colon cancer and heart disease, and many noted his preoccupation with the theme of surviving illness and facing down death in The Executive Director of the Fallen World, his last and finest poetry collection. Whatever the mysteries surrounding Rector’s suicide, the book is full of fallen, disillusioned personae, many of them confronting terminal illness and death, and all of them easy to identify with the poet himself. But Rector’s hard-won insight and incandescent gallows humor lighten the way, intermixing pathos with practical wisdom, tragedy with relentless sass. Often his mordant irony and slang diction prove to be his best defenses against despair, as in “So We’ll Go No More,” which presents a dying speaker’s valediction to his lover: “Cancer, heart attack, bypass—all // In the same year? My chances / Are 20%! And I’m fucking well / Ready, ready to go.” For Rector’s speakers, the past is a looming presence. “Now” presents a tender, comic, and ultimately beautiful overview of life as a lesson in disheartenment from early childhood to death, while “First Marriage,” “Beautiful, Sane Women,” and “Our Last Period Together” all document failed relationships with a humor so delicate that it can barely conceal the vulnerability it seeks to disguise. Rector attended six different colleges and lived in 48 different homes; part of the American promise, as he sees it in these poems, is that, if we keep moving from place to place and from relationship to relationship, we will somehow find happiness. In “Song Years” he writes: “For years I lived in a kind / Of wistful song world where / One foot was always out // The Door, almost like a sailor / Ready, anxious even, to decamp / Once more for the sea...” It would have been exhilarating to see where he moved next."—Robert Schnall, Boston Review

Liam Rector is founder and director of the graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

Imprint: University Of Chicago Press
Distributor: Chicago Distribution Center
Publication Date: 10-15-2006
Pages: 96
Measurements: 8.20in X 6.13in