Lisa Fishman & Richard Meier

media release: Join us at Leopold's at 3PM on June 3rd for a book talk with authors Lisa Fishman and Richard Meier! Pre-ordering here guarantees you a copy of Richard Meier's new collection of poem-essays, A Duration, for 10% off.

About A Duration:

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.”

About the authors:

Lisa Fishman is a dual U. S./Canadian writer whose debut fiction collection, World Naked Bike Ride, has just been released on Gaspereau Press, one of Canada’s most innovative literary publishers. Her seven books of poetry include Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020), 24 Pages and other poems (Wave, 2015), F L O W E R C A R T and The Happiness Experiment, both on Ahsahta Press. She has new work in Granta and is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Not For Mothers Only, and elsewhere. A PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize nominee and Pushcart nominee, Fishman lives on her farm and orchard in Orfordville as well as in Madison; she also directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Richard Meier has published five books of poetry: A Duration (Wave Books, 2023), February March April April (Oxeye Press, 2017), In the Pure Block of the Whole Imaginary (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.