A Duration

A Duration by Richard Meier is a poem-essays that explore the relationship between writing and lived experience, transmuting years of daily practices of attention into mesmerizing trajectories through an always unfolding present. It plays both hearts with a heartbeat and kinship of place, time, and mundanity in the continuous onrushing imagined joy.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 144 pages
Publication date: 20 July 2023
Publisher: Wave Books

In the poem-essays that make up A Duration, writing becomes a physical act in which 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, taking on new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily attention practices—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."

In the poem-essays that make up A Duration, writing becomes a physical act in which 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, taking on new roles. Here, in his fifth book, Richard Meier transmutes years of daily attention practices—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."

Dimension: 152 x 215 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781950268788