Praise for Half Lives: Petrarchan Poems

Jackson’s Petrarch poems are richly textured, idiomatic, elegiac, plangent, and personal.
—Stanley Plumly 

This remarkable series, athletic in its passion, sonorous and brave, reconfirms that love dines on both a lover’s heart and brain, and that the mortality of love encompasses the world. It also reminds us by its example that literature is a grand conversation spanning centuries and cultures. Petrarch is the spark, but Jackson’s the one on fire.
—Marvin Bell 

Richard Jackson makes me love Petrarch again… Here is our first modern poet reinvented.
—Gerald Stern