A Duration

Summary

***This book was read in its entirety, in front of a live audience at Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle, March 2023.***

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.”