Poetry. Winner of the 2018 Tenth Gate Prize. In these poems Brad Richard has created a mythos that at first appears to be a warning about where our world is headed, yet reveals itself as a dirge for a way of being that we've not yet realized is gone. PARASITE KINGDOM uses the architectural tools of Moby-Dick and Borges' El Aleph in the construction of underground caverns where Richard's poetry moves deftly, dangerously. A collection such as this could only have been written after the accretion of decades of reading, thinking, and writing. The Tenth Gate imprint exists in acknowledgement of precisely this kind of poetry: that borne only out of long gestation. Says Dan Beachy-Quick, "Perhaps we need most what Brad Richard works toward in PARASITE KINGDOM: a radical and instantaneous mytho-poesis that might give us perspective by breaking the whole damn thing apart. Taking both inspiration and refuge in Herman Melville--that fundamental chronicler of American unconscious--Richard gives us new apocrypha to ward off current apocalypse, offers us new symbols by which we might come to understand ourselves."