"Much of this book is a dense, exhilarating ride through phantasmagoria, illuminated by bright, gleaming generalities: 'someone in the audience will wonder if that is how we are meant to survive our memories.' How are we to survive not only our memories, but diminishment and nightmare? Many of the gods who preside here are movie makers, from Jacques Tourneur to Takashi Miike. But startlingly, these mysterious and eloquent poems culminate in the long, next-to-last, magnificent poem 'Son et Lumiere.' Stevens now is the fecund model, as Richard Deming modulates beautifully between four- and five- and even six-line stanzas. This is a tremendously accomplished, fascinating book." -Frank Bidart

Richard Deming is a poet and a theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. His collection of poems, Let's Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford UP, 2008), and he regularly contributes to such magazines as Artforum and The Boston Review. His poems have appeared in such places as Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and The Nation. He was the Spring 2012 John P. Birkelund Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin.He is currently a senior lecturer at Yale University.