In the poem-essays that comprise A Durationin 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."