The Slow News of Need


$12 US
ISBN 0-938999-51-6

Richard Duffee speaks in dozens of distinct voices, mingling satire, conundrum, fable, and theater to depict the struggle of individual humans to get by. Having spent much of his life among people with little but spirit, Duffee knows need, and his observations are vivid and passionate.

Stephen Fournier, activist attorney

Duffee expands our otherwise myopic American vision to include the whole world.

G. Scott Deshefy, poet and behavioral-ecologist

About the Author
Ordering

In The Slow News of Need human voices and irrepressible intelligence(s) cry into the thin air of contemporary life, demanding to be heard, to be known.

John Sakson, poet and teacher

This is an important book. Richard Duffee gives us great insight into how power works in the minds of the powerful and on the minds of the powerless.

Mike DeRosa, radio producer

This is the poetry of moral economics, endlessly numerative and enormously sad. More than any other poet I know, Duffee’s work (of all kinds) and life occupy a brightly lit, highly conscious moral space. The things and people he cares about number in the millions, but do not, for the most part, include himself. You have to spend time around poets to realize how utterly strange this is. It’s always been true, and he’s always been the best, and the most genuine I know.

Timothy Porges, librarian

The Slow News of Need, started in 1966, got its present design in 2001. Since then Richard Duffee has been assembling it piece by piece, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle.

About the Author

Born in 1948, Richard Duffee lived fifteen years outside Philadelphia, ten mostly in Chicago, twenty in the Hudson Valley, then nine in South Asia, where he married into an Indian family. As a child immersed in biology, in adolescence he turned to philosophy and literature, then, at 38, to law, especially international and environmental law. He has worked as a busboy, a painter, a bookseller, a psychiatric aide, a plumber, an editor, a photographer, a teacher of English, science, and history, an advocate for the homeless, a lawyer, and, in India, as a grant writer and law professor. Long active in protest and politics, he is the 2008 Green Party nominee for Congress in the 4th district of Connecticut and writes and speaks on the ethics of the relations between the rich and poor countries, global warming, and law.