Richard Chess is the author of three previous books of poetry: Tekiah (1996), Chair in the Desert (2000), and Third Temple (2006), all published by the University of Tampa Press. His poems have appeared widely in journals such as Image, Literature and Belief, New England Review, and Smartish Pace, and in anthologies including Best American Spiritual Writing 2005, Telling and Remembering: A Century of American Jewish Poetry, and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is Chair of the English Department and Director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of North Carolina Asheville.

Books by Richard Chess:

Other poems on the web by Richard Chess:
"Why Believe in God?"

Richard Chess's Website.

About Love Nailed to the Doorpost:

"Love collides with love in Richard Chess s latest collection, shattering love as a way to understand its mystery and ache. The force behind the collisions is the pressure Chess applies to the Torah and Jewish traditions to help him make sense of his longing and losses; and those in turn to make sense of the tradition. Unflinching, real, and wise, Chess poems are worthy of sharing with anyone all of us who seek what love seeks in us."
—Emily Warn

"Sweet poems, personal poems, that resonate with the flavor and wistful spirituality of the Jewish people and our long impassioned history. Rick Chess s poems are quietly honest and real, companions for our own sad journeys, at home or abroad, in these sunset days on earth. A book to savor and contemplate, for its depth and wisdom."
—Norman Fischer

"Love Nailed to the Doorpost is about all the kinds of love you can think of as well as many you can't, but which shine as Richard Chess illuminates them. The title and indeed the whole book evoke the generative love at the heart of the Jewish covenant with God. At the same time the title and the whole book evoke the manipulative and violent possibilities of erotic love, family love, political love, religious love, literary love. In these brilliant new poems Chess offers a profound, wistful and elegiac report on personal and human history even as he recounts the urgent destructions of youth. But let me be more simple and more clear: Wow. Just wow! Read this book. Now. If you are reading my words, stop. Enter the room of this book, kiss the mezuzah on its doorposts and prepare to be dazzled."
—Judith Baumel