Richard Frailing is a first year poetry student in the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment. He hopes to push his narrative poetry further into the blurry space between poetry and lyrical nonfiction. His undergraduate education in both biology and English is apparent in poems which focus largely on the juxtaposition between intimate spaces and the impersonality of the natural world. The spectres of physical and biological evolution consistently intrude into scenes of human closeness, often culminating in meditations on disintegration and memory.
Along these moody lines, Richard is also a passionate musician in love with thoughtfully warped sounds and the warm hug of analog distortion. Before he filled every cubic inch of his 2007 Prius with belongings and drove from the salt marshes of southeast VA to the IA prairies, he played guitar in the post-rock band Heliotrope. Digital distortion and the tendency toward impersonality in our plugged-in society is another spectre he hopes to examine in more factual pieces.
Richard has lived his whole life in VA, and would not have found his love of verse or the natural world without his undergraduate mentors at Old Dominion University Timothy Seibles and Dr. Lytton Musselman, both of whom he will be forever grateful to. Though he’ll miss hiking with his bandmates along the prehistoric ridges of Appalachia and drinking gose beer by the waterways of Hampton Roads, he is honored and ecstatic to further his literary pursuits at Iowa State where he hopes to immediately start basking in the geological and biological quirks of the prairies.