For Now — poems, aphorisms, ten-second essays, microlyrics (Copper Canyon Press, 2020).

During, poems and aphorisms (Copper Canyon Press, 2016)

By the Numbers:  Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010)

Interglacial:  New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Ausable Press/Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

Vectors:  Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press/Copper Canyon Press, 2001)

How Things Are (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2000)

As If (Persea Books, 1992). Reprinted 2023 in the Carnegie Mellon Classic Contemporaries series.

Vanishing Lives:  Style and Self in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, Swinburne and Yeats (University of Virginia Press, 1988)

Second Guesses (Wesleyan University Press, 1984) 

Thomas Hardy:  The Poetry of Necessity (University of Chicago Press, 1977)

Reservations (Princeton University Press, 1977)

Chapbooks:

A Suite for Lucretians (Quarterly Review of Literature, 1999)

Anthologies:

Short Circuits (Schaffner, 2018), Best American Poetry 2016 (Scribner 2016), Short Flights (Schaffner, 2015), Pushcart Prize XXXVII (Pushcart Press, 2012), Best American Poetry 2011 (Scribner, 2011), Best American Poetry 2010 (Scribner, 2010), Pushcart Prize XXXIV (Pushcart Press, 2010), Best American Poetry 2009 (Scribner, 2009), Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists (Bloomsbury USA, 2007), Best American Poetry 2005 (Scribner, 2005), Great American Prose Poems (Scribner, 2003), Best American Poetry 2001 (Scribner, 2001)

“When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang…”, Harvard Review online.

“On the Fly,” “For the Children, “ "Essay on Clouds," "Essay on Wood," "Big Scenes," "Subject, Verb, Object," "End of Summer," and "In Shakespeare" in The New Yorker.

“Grid“ and “To the Next Centuries" in The Nation.

“Vectors 3.0: “Even More Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays,” from By the Numbers (2010).

"One of the Evenings" in T, The New York Times Style Magazine.

"Northwest Passage" in The Best American Poetry 2014.

Q&A with James Richardson: ‘For Now” and the Small Things, with Troy Jollimore in Zyzzyva.

Poetry Month 2016:  An Interview with James Richardson by Jonathan Hobratsch in The Huffington Post

Five Questions for James Richardson by Karl Chwe at Copper Nickel.

A podcast with Paul Muldoon on W.S. Merwin for The New Yorker

National Book Award Finalist interview by Jean Hartig at the National Book Foundation

Interview on the Joe Milford Show

A review of By the Numbers by Jonathan Deming at Coldfront

A review of Interglacial by Sarah Manguso at The Believer

Interview with Brian Brodeur at How a Poem Happens