A Duration
A Duration
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In the poem-essays that comprise A Duration, writing is a physical act where writing and lived experience support one another in bodies—animal, plant, mineral, and word bodies—that are injured and heal, that die and continue in new forms, playing new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily practices of attention—be it to a line spoken by Lear’s Fool, a train to Kingston, or “red inside green stem below eight white petals in a spiral with space between them attached to the yellow center”—into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. In the collapse of the border between writing and the body, A Duration, “play[s] both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy.”
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The reader is sometimes jerked into a world subtly or radically altered, with the poem’s subject, setting, or other details changed… The effect is momentary confusion—and delight. Repeated across a book, this device kindles a sense of dream logic, or of daydreaming while ambling with a friend. There is flora, fauna, weather, and domestic detail, yet the poems live in a cerebral space.
Sylee Gore, Poetry Foundation
Throughout A Duration is the deep image fully realized as the word conjures company—i.e., another person, or at least presence. What transcends the physical more than the relation of the I-Thou?
Abigail Chabitnoy, The Colorado Review -
Richard Meier has published five books of poetry: A Duration (Wave Books, 2023), February March April April (Oxeye Press, 2017), In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary (Omnidawn, 2012), Shelley Gave Jane a Guitar (Wave Books, 2006), and Terrain Vague, selected by Tomaz Salamun for the Verse Prize and published by Verse Press in 2001. In recent years he has practiced and taught workshops on writing and walking and other daily and durational writing practices. He is Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College and lives in Somers and Madison, WI.
Publication: June 2023
ISBN# 9781950268788 (5.5 x 8, 144pp, paperback)
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