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Square Inch Hours: Poems
In the manner of a poetic meditation, Square Inch Hours draws on elements from fiction, memoir, daybook, and reverie, piecing together moments that follow in the aftermath of a breakdown.
Writing from an area outside psychology or personal history, the intensely solitary speaker relates the experience of reengaging with the world. With an adamant attentiveness, he turns his focus to observing reality in its minutest particulars: the expression on the face of a random passerby; the palsied hand of a grocery clerk; copulating flies on a windowsill; a deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door. How he perceives is how he reconnects. The title, Square Inch Hours, expresses that impulse to capture each moment, as in the square of a photograph.
Writing from an area outside psychology or personal history, the intensely solitary speaker relates the experience of reengaging with the world. With an adamant attentiveness, he turns his focus to observing reality in its minutest particulars: the expression on the face of a random passerby; the palsied hand of a grocery clerk; copulating flies on a windowsill; a deep gouge, like a bullet hole, in his apartment door. How he perceives is how he reconnects. The title, Square Inch Hours, expresses that impulse to capture each moment, as in the square of a photograph.
80 pages, Hardcover
Published July 11, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
April 16, 2017
These poems are short chunks, paragraphs of one thought at a time. Don't be threatened by the wall of words - in the end they are easy to grasp.
Square Inch Hours - 1.
"...What if she'd read me incorrectly?"
From an Unlined Spiral Notebook
"...A woman who walks with such lightness of spirit that after she passes I stagger beneath the weight of my body."
Thanks to the publisher for providing access through Edelweiss, during National Poetry Month.
Square Inch Hours - 1.
"...What if she'd read me incorrectly?"
From an Unlined Spiral Notebook
"...A woman who walks with such lightness of spirit that after she passes I stagger beneath the weight of my body."
Thanks to the publisher for providing access through Edelweiss, during National Poetry Month.
June 25, 2017
Square Inch Hours is an assortment of bright fragments of experience, vivid observations recorded with the unprejudiced clarity of a child. I feel a sense of awe for what Sherod Santos has done. He records memories with gracious acceptance, memories of events, places, and people, trusting himself “to fate” after a breakdown. Here is a mind given fully to beingness, following the experience of separation from it. There is a superb vulnerability in this work; it stirs a desire in me to look after the gentle and sorrowful poet, to watch his back as he ventures through scenarios of death, love, medication and isolation. His perceptions lead outside and inside himself, circling back to “Small emotions, the great engine of life” with self-effacing and sometimes hilarious candor. An astonishingly original and courageous work that all at once subverts and satisfies literary expectations.
December 31, 2021
yeaaaaaaaaa like staring at the side of an apartment building at all the little lives....?
August 4, 2019
This poetry collection really dug into my psyche, because it reflects a lot of thoughts and feelings and sensations that I experience but have never seen so clearly described anywhere (which honestly sounds a bit like a description of poetry in general.) It's one where the reading itself was a journey and even if I didn't remember a word of it after closing the book (though I will), the moment itself would have been worth it.
September 19, 2017
My first read from the National Book Awards Poetry longlist. Sherod Santos's Square Inch Hours comes in a style of meditative prose poetry that I usually really like, but this collection didn't work that well for me. Maybe it is because each individual section is a bit too short for its own good, so it was hard to grasp on to something, whether it be a single line or an overarching concept, before Santos moved on. That being said, Square Inch Hours does capture that feeling of being inside one's own head, yet still processing what is going on in the perceptive world outside the self. Mark it neutral, I suppose.
October 2, 2017
The final pages blew me away.
May 8, 2022
Some phrases I deeply related to which isn’t a natural oftentimes occurrence. I genuinely loved that above all. That’s the ultimate reward sometimes: to be understood.
Few of my favorite phrases:
“After such a long day of sensations, I not only felt exhausted, I also felt I’d lost the means to think coherently about anything.”
“Whether from willfulness or lethargy, each day he spent in the foreign city brought a growing detachment from the past, from anything, that is, that made the past accessible. At the same time, his life assumed the custom of necessity.”
“I began to doubt the truth of my perceptions. To suspect that like some Hollywood film I’d been making up rather than experiencing them.”
“If this wasn’t peace, it was nonetheless an image from which the experience of peace spilled over into the world. A moment in its own right, pointing toward nothing beyond itself, only it and what would become of it.”
“Though I observed them very carefully, the expressions on the faces of the people nearby were careful not to give anything away.”
“Sympathetic as I am to the aesthetics of silence, to the childlike fantasy of escaping the material world of words”
“Small emotions, the great engine of my life.”
“Setting the book aside, it occurs to me that memoirs should all begin the same way, “First of all, forgive me.”
“At some point in the evening it becomes clear to me that I spent the day refusing to do anything I’d planned to do in the morning.”
“He explains the funeral home’s practice of donating leftover flowers to a nearby nursing home, “to bring the old folks a little cheer.” But how terribly confused the flowers must be.”
“Coming back from the library, the sensation of being “accompanied,” as though I were walking off to one side of myself.”
My favorite sections:
From (The Consolations of Philosophy) ♥️
“In the past four weeks, I have finally understood my own writings; not only that, I admire them.”
From (Pessoa)💘
“At some point in his early twenties, the old-world Sensationist began to speak, not as himself, but for himself, the great author of his poems, Álvaro de Campos. And what was that sensation? “Of facing myself left behind on the seat of a trolley.”
(Zenobius the Rhetorician) 💘
(Overseen by a sliding glass panel) 💔
(I went for a walk in winter) ❄️
(From an Unlined Spiral Notebook) 💘💘
Ps. I know this is long but I couldn’t resist the temptation to be as descriptive as I can describing this beautiful poetry collection that I related to on a high level… it’s also heavily annotated :)))
Few of my favorite phrases:
“After such a long day of sensations, I not only felt exhausted, I also felt I’d lost the means to think coherently about anything.”
“Whether from willfulness or lethargy, each day he spent in the foreign city brought a growing detachment from the past, from anything, that is, that made the past accessible. At the same time, his life assumed the custom of necessity.”
“I began to doubt the truth of my perceptions. To suspect that like some Hollywood film I’d been making up rather than experiencing them.”
“If this wasn’t peace, it was nonetheless an image from which the experience of peace spilled over into the world. A moment in its own right, pointing toward nothing beyond itself, only it and what would become of it.”
“Though I observed them very carefully, the expressions on the faces of the people nearby were careful not to give anything away.”
“Sympathetic as I am to the aesthetics of silence, to the childlike fantasy of escaping the material world of words”
“Small emotions, the great engine of my life.”
“Setting the book aside, it occurs to me that memoirs should all begin the same way, “First of all, forgive me.”
“At some point in the evening it becomes clear to me that I spent the day refusing to do anything I’d planned to do in the morning.”
“He explains the funeral home’s practice of donating leftover flowers to a nearby nursing home, “to bring the old folks a little cheer.” But how terribly confused the flowers must be.”
“Coming back from the library, the sensation of being “accompanied,” as though I were walking off to one side of myself.”
My favorite sections:
From (The Consolations of Philosophy) ♥️
“In the past four weeks, I have finally understood my own writings; not only that, I admire them.”
From (Pessoa)💘
“At some point in his early twenties, the old-world Sensationist began to speak, not as himself, but for himself, the great author of his poems, Álvaro de Campos. And what was that sensation? “Of facing myself left behind on the seat of a trolley.”
(Zenobius the Rhetorician) 💘
(Overseen by a sliding glass panel) 💔
(I went for a walk in winter) ❄️
(From an Unlined Spiral Notebook) 💘💘
Ps. I know this is long but I couldn’t resist the temptation to be as descriptive as I can describing this beautiful poetry collection that I related to on a high level… it’s also heavily annotated :)))
February 14, 2020
Coming back from the library, I feel the sensation of being "accompanied," as though I were walking off to one side of myself.
How slowly the life seems to drain from her face as bite by bite her lipstick smudges away.
The anesthetist yawns before releasing the serum sending me into oblivion.
After a long drizzly offshore fog, the sky finally cleared, and it went on clearing throughout the day, the sun getting brighter by the hour, seabirds circling like ashes in the air. And then, as if a second sun appeared in another quadrant of the sky, the heavy, flexing surface of the water radiated outward from a central flare, the widening rings overrunning the pier until it seemed that only shadows remained, holding the places for what was gone.
A sudden, audible yawn--her mouth so wide it doesn't appear to be part of her face--from a girl reading at the library table. Then just as abruptly she closes her mouth and scans the room with the quiet, cow-eyed gaze so admired by the Etruscan painters.
How slowly the life seems to drain from her face as bite by bite her lipstick smudges away.
The anesthetist yawns before releasing the serum sending me into oblivion.
After a long drizzly offshore fog, the sky finally cleared, and it went on clearing throughout the day, the sun getting brighter by the hour, seabirds circling like ashes in the air. And then, as if a second sun appeared in another quadrant of the sky, the heavy, flexing surface of the water radiated outward from a central flare, the widening rings overrunning the pier until it seemed that only shadows remained, holding the places for what was gone.
A sudden, audible yawn--her mouth so wide it doesn't appear to be part of her face--from a girl reading at the library table. Then just as abruptly she closes her mouth and scans the room with the quiet, cow-eyed gaze so admired by the Etruscan painters.
March 2, 2018
A slender 2017 collection of poems by Santos is a quiet,
nearly sombre experience. Dream-like flow of intensity.
"And darkness cheeped like a tiny bird." "So thin the ice.
And the hand that pressed against it from below."
And from a poem about Brecht, "Mother Courage," comes
this: "...a madwoman at the end of the pier sang a song
composed entirely of obscenities." One entire section named
Life Among the Vanished. Haunting work.
nearly sombre experience. Dream-like flow of intensity.
"And darkness cheeped like a tiny bird." "So thin the ice.
And the hand that pressed against it from below."
And from a poem about Brecht, "Mother Courage," comes
this: "...a madwoman at the end of the pier sang a song
composed entirely of obscenities." One entire section named
Life Among the Vanished. Haunting work.
October 17, 2017
A collection of lovely, thoughtful vignettes through which a world is created.
January 9, 2026
More of a 3.5! Some of the poems were so beautiful. The little moments of life that we barely notice are the moments that give life its meaning.
March 6, 2024
I love the Sqaure Inch Hours one. So dauntingly beautiful. But for others, I don't know.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews