Within the Hour: Poems and Aphorisms, 1971–2026

James Richardson

Forthcoming September 2026

Cover Design: Phil Kovacevich. Cover Art: Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: Plate 765, 1887. Collotype. © Eadweard Muybridge. Image courtesy of Digital Commonwealth.

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.

Paperback: $19.00 list price

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ISBN: 9781556597398

Format: Paperback

“Either Out Far or In Deep”

My nearsighted eye is for splinters, the threading of needles,
the scales on a monarch’s wing, the atom within the atom.
But as for the hills and trees? It sees only promising haze.

My farsighted eye distinguishes mile-off exits,
stealth bombers, the weather of exoplanets.
It can make out the time on the wall—but not on my wrist.

Sometimes I worry my worries are paradoxical,
at once galactically huge and absurdly small.
But as far as I can see, that’s what everyone feels.

I’ve never seen such a prescription, says the optometrist.
Let’s make them the same. No thanks: don’t all the worst people
walk around all day agreeing with themselves?

The one eye sees way out in the infinite multiverse
infinite versions of me, both better and worse.
They probably average out—should I worry?

The other one sees that down in my trillions of cells,
my zillions and zillions of coiling molecules,
there is nothing at all I could really call myself.

I figure my two bad eyes together are one pretty good one,
argumentative, sure, but agreeing in the end
that far out is no further from me than far in.

It’s the middle distance they really have trouble with,
beginning about at arm’s length and comprising
tête-à-têtes, committees—some days, my whole life.

I can’t see your point then, I can’t see where you’re coming from,
I can’t read the room, and worse, I can’t read your face.
It feels like, near or far, I’m blinded by everything.

If I blunder then, if I stumble, it’s my eyes contending
over which of their visions should be trusted.
Step back, the one eye says. No, closer, says the other.

 

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 2011 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 …

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Reviews

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

“[Richardson’s] books are, in my view, 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.”—Zyzzyva