One

Poetry. Gerald Fleming is a remarkable writer, made more so by his commitment to the prose poem, a form which at its best, as here, is a delicious treat on almost every occasion. His new volume, ONE, takes on the monosyllable and wrestles it into dizzying and wonderful pretzel-esque works which may appear, at first glance, non-pretzel- esque. You’ll probably love this book as much as I do.–Frederick Barthelme

At times wry and wickedly self-aware, these linked prose vignettes deepen into a resonant, searching meditation on that which resides hidden within us–metastatic cells, racism we’ve spent half our years unlearning, the slow burn of our lives. Fleming’s voice is rich with a plainspoken elegance that evokes flickers of Ovid (‘the years fled from her face, ’ he writes in elegy) or the quieted mind of a Gerard Manley Hopkins who’s made peace with his god and is engaged in the contemplative practice of ordinary life. In this almost- Oulipian project, poet and speaker both gently interrogate language and self, ‘take each shred down from the line / sew it to the next, soak it in brine / look at it / see that it means in ways we’ve not known–now finds us, & like us it’s scarred now, but still ours–back in our mouths, on our tongues–quick birds! –flung into the air of our time.’ ONE is a powerful collection woven of grief, compassion, and the joy of a life well lived. Sidling up against fiction’s narrative drive, it’s told in a reinvented sprung rhythm sure and steady as a heartbeat, as the beat of one’s own footsteps.–Miriam Bird Greenberg