Richard Harteis' CRUMBS Has Been Selected as One of the Ten Best Poetry Books Published in 2024

Groton, CT, June 13, 2025 --(PR.com)-- Poetry Mutual’s DC Area Poetry Year End Review has listed Richard Harteis’ CRUMBS, as one of the ten best poetry books published in 2024. A second edition titled CRUMBS TOO includes many previously unpublished poems and has just been published by Poets’ Choice Publishing. In the introduction to CRUMBS and CRUMBS TOO, Harteis quotes Rilke’s LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET, who says that everything will become easier, "if you trust in Nature, and what is simple in Nature in the small ,things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable, if you have this love for what is humble, and try very simply as someone who serves to win the confidence of what seems poor.” And Richard Wilbur has described how fruitful an aesthetic is that focuses on things. “Nothing but in things,” the bard from New Jersey reminds us.

In his book, THE POWER OF NOW, and later in THE NEW EARTH, Eckhart Tolle tells us that the goal in life is to look at reality with full attention, full consciousness. And so these small “crumbs.”

In legend, one leaves crumbs by the wayside to find our way back home. What happens if a bird or some creature eats the crumbs we have carefully left to guide us? Are we lost? It is the placing of the crumbs that matters. Paying attention to our life, marking the moments that have caused us to stop and make sense of what has just happened. Only an exercise in observation perhaps, but fruitful one hopes, or at least pleasurable for a reader: getting to know another human being in language. All art is an attempt to overcome our physical limitations, to transcend ourselves, and greet another with love.