Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

James Richardson

Laurie Sheck writes, “Vectors is a book of subversive wonders. Stunningly precise, these brilliant aphorisms and ten-second essays show a mind assessing, reassessing, discovering, and interrogating assumptions in ways that feel diamond sharp, at once good-natured, quietly sly at times, and always very shrewd. Richardson’s aphorisms alight on everything from the nature of perception, to God, shame, self-consciousness, love, and friendship with wit and great wisdom.”

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ISBN: 9780967266893

Format: Paperback

ISBN: 9780967266886

Format: Hardcover

Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

1. The road reaches every place, the short cut only one.

2. Those who demand consideration for their sacrifices were making investments, not sacrifices.

3. What you give to a thief is stolen.

4. Despair says, I cannot lift that weight. Happiness says, I do not have to.

5. You’ve never said anything as stupid as what people thought you said.

6. Our avocations bring us the purest joys. Praise my salads or my softball, and I am deified for a day. But tell me I am a great teacher or a great writer and you force me to tell myself the truth.

24. Of all the ways to avoid living, perfect discipline is the most admired.

32. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough.

37. As much innocence is found as lost.

38. The world is not what anyone wished for, but it’s what everyone wished for.

132. Easier to cry at a silly movie than for your own sadness, easier to laugh at another than at yourself. If you manage to laugh that harder laughter, it is because you see what others see. And if you cry for yourself, unless with the most powerful grief, it is because you have cast yourself in a role so melodramatic you can weep as one of the watchers.

359. The road not taken is the part of you not taking the road.

About the Author

James Richardson’s recent collections include During (Copper Canyon, 2016), which received the the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as the best book in progress; By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2010), a Publishers Weekly “Best Book of 2010” and a finalist for the National Book Award; Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon, 2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Copper Canyon, 2001). …

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Reviews

“Not since the appearance of W.S. Merwin’s translations and adaptations of aphorisms in Asian Figures, some thirty years ago, has an American poet managed to put down so much delightful and compelling wisdom.” —American Literary Review

“No one theme or moral pervades these tesserae of specificity. Rather, Richardson’s elegant compression invites the reader to fill in the blanks with personal experience… Richardson’s knack for the quintessential, sustained for more than a hundred pages, left me satisfied yet hungry for more.” —Times Literary Supplement

“Readers will be obsessed by this book; they will memorize passages, give copies to friends, proselytize. That’s because Vectors so generously provides the best that poetry can offer. It is a masterpiece of practicality, beauty, and solace.” —Boston Review

“James Richardson’s Vectors… penetrates to the very heart of human nature. I stand looking in the mirror, alert to my own foibles, shaking my head as I tolerate what I know he knows about who I am.” —Georgia Review

“Almost every entry… introduces a new insight, provides a revelation, supplies a surprise… it is a book one wants to spend time with, a wonderfully friendly book, generous, witty and entertaining.” —Gulf Coast

“Vectors is the kind of book you read, reread, thumb through, and pick up several extra copies because you want to share the joy you found in perusing it with friends.” —Barrow Street