Ralph Angel
Poetry is the language for which we have no language. Ralph Angel
Ralph Angel’s collection of poems, Your Moon, was awarded the 2013 Green Rose Poetry Prize. Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986-2006 received the 2007 PEN USA Poetry Award, and his Neither World won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. In addition to five books of poetry, he also published an award-winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.
“Ralph Angel possesses what every poet dreams of − a warm heart and a cold eye.”
All of his poems have a foothold between Everything and Nothing, the place each of us lives in, day in and day out, though we seldom recognize or admit it the way these poems do. Many of them unfold like a ravishing film, to which a voice-over adds such haunting commentary we are surprised to reach the end and realize we have been…reading! - Mary Ruefle
Ralph Angel’s spare lyrics are set in an urban landscape that seems timeless, universal, and historical.
His poems have appeared in scores of magazines, both in the U.S. and abroad, and have been collected in numerous anthologies, including The Plume Anthology of Poetry, Pratik International, The Heart's Many Doors, The Best American Poetry, American Hybrid, Poets of the New Century, and Forgotten Language. Following a brief illness, Ralph Angel passed away on March 6, 2020, with his wife, Mary, by his side.
