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When he isn’t encouraging students at ��Ӱֱ�� State to express themselves through writing, Richard Mitchell, professor of English, is contemplating his own creative endeavors—namely, poetry. His latest book, (Aldrich Press), hit the stands this July and is already receiving acclaim. “Mitchell's poetry is distinctive—it triggers emotion in the reader without the use of sentimentality, intellectual thought without the use of lecture, and above all, an appreciation of sensory opportunities that the reader instinctively feels she would have missed without Mitchell's poetry to serve as a prompt,” says Dr. Daniel Barwick, president of Independence Community College in Independence, Kansas. “Some of the poems are tragic and some are lighter fare, but all prompt a feeling of immediacy, intimacy, and sensory richness.”

The book is a collection of poems—each with its own voice and emotional quality—all sharing the same sense of poignancy. “What happens to us when things are lost?” Mitchell asks. “The impetus came from me asking myself that question—how do people deal with different kinds of loss?”

Although the poems are intimately connected, each piece is written using a different persona. And while some of these voices stem from the writer’s own experiences, many, Mitchell says, are simply tools he uses to peel away the layers of subjective experience in order to get at the heart of what it is, for anyone, to feel significant loss. “As a poet, he asks us to use all of our senses, and he challenges us by creating complex metaphors about human nature and the natural world,” says Calista McBride, interim chair of Amazon.com.