A Companion
In this new collection of poem-essays, poet Richard Meier continues his inquiry into daily writings (first presented in 2023,A Duration), exploring the connections between days, moving forward and backward through time.
Composed from daily writing practices and years of looping reductions and arrangements, this innovative work asks what it means to be in company. Accompanied in “this present tense that refuses no one” by an inter-generational cast of a nine-hour play, friends, strangers, trees, stones, animals, people in dreams and nightmares—and by readers of the book—Meier allows the present moment to widen and become a site of continuance: “unbranched, undivided, the whole movement of a whole body . . .free from the leaves of the grass and // revealed as a companion.”
Richard Meier (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.
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