remanence

As Ron Silliman has written, “Attention is all.” The poems in remanence are supremely attentive to the world—or rather to the traces it leaves in our brains. They also make a study of misperception and error. This is a form of meditation. Much of the book is composed of five-line poems, each long line a semi-separate thought, a probe. Each a kind of echolocation. Gently, insistently, they bring us news of our position. —Rae Armantrout | Boyer Rickel’s titles read like names of constellations Leonardo’s man might have inscribed inside his magic circle, each poem mapping points from sources near and far, physical and metaphysical, whose light is just reaching us now on the night sky of the page, our own nothingness acutely felt under such immensities, the future an occasion to commemorate what is already irrevocably past. Then for an encore, his fractured verses are resampled, reconstituted into a whole new music, verticals answering horizontals in a cosmic choral round. —Timothy Liu | In remanence, the brilliant stanzaic lyrical structures of Rickel’s early work give way. Here, the unimaginable, the imagined, the real and the irreal form a new improvisational logic. Here, associative diction imagistically and cognitively collide historic and personal worlds. Certain of its craft, sure of its architecture, the book closes with a reawakening: all the short poems reconfigure as longer riffs in a new shape and signature. —Jane Miller