Within the Hour: Poems and Aphorism, 1971-2026

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.