[07/21/26] Chess, Richard: The Loneliest Monk

Orison Books, paperback

Publication Date: July 21, 2026

Publisher Marketing: From aleph to bet, "a" to "b," a gap. As wide or as narrow as the gap between the loneliest monk and his neighbor, human or Divine. That's the gap the loneliest monk of Richard Chess's fifth poetry collection seeks to bridge. Who is the loneliest monk? As Chess writes, he's a "monk without a monastery," "a sit without a sangha," "a minyan of one." In other words, he lives outside of traditional settings and belongs to no traditional community. Nevertheless, because hunger troubles his every waking hour, he draws on Judaism and other traditions in his search for ultimate connection. In poems characterized by their wit and wisdom, The Loneliest Monk offers us glimpses of a seeker's life from childhood through early old-age.

"A boy becomes a yearning man, an unlikely monk longs for Jerusalem, and an American poet tries typing his way to Eden in this quietly ferocious book of questions and mysteries. With a dry wit, a cunning formal intelligence, and an old soul, Richard Chess takes us on an enigmatic, thoughtful, and moving spiritual quest." — Edward Hirsch, President, Guggenheim Foundation

"One verse in this extraordinary collection of poems reminds us that 'each in his own way / plods in the direction / of heaven.' But surely there are some poets who are more compelling guides on that journey than others, and Richard Chess is one of them. In the poems of The Loneliest Monk, the search for God, the absence of God, and God's overwhelming presence are everywhere—but not because the language is exalted. Rather, the words are lowly, gritty, and gorgeously crafted. The hesitancy of a monk at a table, the colors of a courtroom, the sizzle of onions in a skillet are all portals for the sacred. Never have the poems of a mystic been so profoundly mundane, and so deeply transformative, in one and the same voice." — Laurie L. Patton, President, American Academy of Arts & Sciences

"These quiet, beautiful, personal, funny, honest, self-questioning, meditative poems explore the insistent presence which seems to hide its face within and beyond the world. Embracing Jerusalem and the Jersey shore, baseball and Bereishit, Richard Chess's loneliest monk is a quintessential Jewish American seeker—Jewish in his wry self-doubt, his prayerful longing, his bookishness, his suffusion in the music of the textual tradition; American in his accents, attachments, his solitary quest for an original relation to the universe. These poems amply reward our full attention." — Max Rudin, President & Publisher, Library of America