Within the Hour - by James Richardson (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

In his sixth decade of literary passion and compassion, Richardson finds the years shorter but the hours just as long. We have only Now--but always Now.

Winner of the prestigious Jackson Poetry Prize, James Richardson is a poet of extraordinary range, ease, and clarity. Within the Hour joins the best of nine previous volumes to a considerable body of new work: There are piercing, short lyrics, among them elegies for his parents, killed in a car crash, and for his younger brother who died at nineteen. There are hundreds of the aphorisms and ten-second essays for which he is most renowned and beloved, many of them new. Richardson's meditations on the ordinary and the extraordinary reach from clocks and paper clips and clouds to alt-facts, the suffering ocean, and the erotics of metals. Swerving between wit and tenderness, his poems blend the lyric and the philosophical and turn almost imperceptibly into parables of our lives in love and time.

Review Quotes

Praise for James Richardson

"Richardson is an unsung genius, America's great living aphorist and a poet of profound compassion, wisdom, and humility."--Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"James Richardson is one of the finest poets now writing, and the best contemporary practitioner of the art of aphorism."--Publishers Weekly

"His books are . . . some of the most beautiful produced by any American writer of the past few decades; they contain echoes of many poets distributed throughout many countries and centuries, yet they always sound contemporary, as if they were written last night--or ten years from now."--Troy Jollimore, ZYZZYVA

"[O]ne of America's most distinctive contemporary poets . . . a powerful and moving body of work that in its intimacy and philosophical naturalism is unique in contemporary American poetry."--Boston Review

"Distinct, lively, and apparently effortless, James Richardson's voice has evolved . . . into a remarkable presence in contemporary poetry. Richardson is a moral philosopher and a student of science; his formal and intellectual rigor is matched by the compassion with which he examines our complex negotiation with love and time, illuminating our sense of ourselves. A master of concision, he has breathed new life into the art of the aphorism--becoming, in these masterful, tiny poems, a 21st century American Heraclitus."--Judges' citation, Jackson Poetry Prize

About the Author

James Richardson's collections of poems, aphorisms, and ten-second essays include For Now; During, the winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Prize of the Poetry Society of America; By the Numbers, a National Book Award finalist; Interglacial, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; and Vectors. He is the winner of the Jackson Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry and the recipient of a Presidential Teaching Award from Princeton University, where he is professor emeritus of creative writing. Richardson lives on a wooded hillside near Princeton with his wife and first reader, the scholar-critic Constance W. Hassett, author of the go-to book on Christina Rossetti. They have two daughters, one a poet and content strategist, one a professor of criminal justice.