A Duration

by Richard Meier

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.”

120 pages, Paperback

Published June 6, 2023

About the author

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Reviews

[Jason Fickett · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's got new breath, fresh air, not the cement legs of poetry - a zone between forms and immediately readable. It pulls you in like fiction and even pulls off a novelistic finish, an arc and a funeral, while maintaining its freedom of language. It feels like he's got endless territory to mine.
**Re-read**
It feels like he's earned this unique zone of writing, which I appreciate even if I don't particularly connect with it. Meditation journals even as highly-crafted poetry ain't what I want to read.

[Zoey Kurka · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Spenser has arranged the moments of anticipation, intense pleasure, and rest in intervals that follow the golden ratio, Maria said, believing the human body functions in that rhythm, and so will be in harmony with the book and so the movements of the book are already in the reader and the movements of the reader are already in the book, and the rhythms of reading become the subject of the book, where the reader learns them and confirms their truth” (“Acting,” p. 21-22)

[Lola Anaya · Rating 4 out of 5]

many beautiful lines and reflections in this book and i was very into the stream of consciousness style that this poetry gave off.

one i particularly enjoyed:

"To be alive I see the weeds coming through the cracks in / Mary's driveway bright yellow, wet green" (p 80)

[Elizabeth OH · Rating 5 out of 5]

I flipped through this at the Brooklyn Book Fair and nearly wept after reading one stanza.