In The Rider Quintet, Mark Rudman has developed a hybrid form in which he merges the intimate and the epic. The work is a synthesis of many genres-dialogue, lyric, travel guide-that merge history and myth, elegy and humor. The five volumes read as one poem, like walking along a variegated road on which you encounter, as the light and landscape change, ditches and deserts, pools and oceans, backwaters and cosmopoli-each of which required a somewhat different form to render. His compact, colloquial and dazzling shifts from popular culture to classical history allow him to create what William Eccleston has called a truly democratic work. Rudman may be the poet that Borges had in mind when he suggested that, were epic to have a renaissance, it could very well come from America.

This 5 volume set includes Rider (1994), The Millennium Hotel (1996), Provoked in Venice (1999), The Couple (2002), and Sundays on the Phone (2005).