James Reiss is the author of four poetry books, the most recent of which, Ten Thousand Good Mornings, was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in such places as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, plus many anthologies, textbooks, and Web sites. He has won numerous national and regional literary awards and grants. He is Professor of English and Editor of Miami University Press in Oxford, Ohio.

About Riff on Six:

"Although these poems do not make grand pronouncements they have as their source what Howard Nemerov called ‘great primary human drama,’ and they are always interesting and often moving."
—Peter Meinke, The New Republic

"In Reiss, poems are laid in drawers, folded in books; memories are like pictures cut out of magazines, inertia and insomnia are the two forms of life. Pursued by the same phantoms, which reappear on the telephone, in sequential rooms, in snapshots, in slides, Reiss writes them down in an accomplished plain style, with a momentum carrying whole poems along on the humming acceleration of a single sentence."
—Helen Vendler, The New York Times Book Review