One by Gerald Fleming

Gerald Fleming is the author of  five books of poetry (three from HL) and numerous books for teachers. He taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools, has edited literary magazines traditional, epistolary, and vitreous, and recently edited The Collected Poetry and Prose of Lawrence Fixel (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2020). He lives most of the year in the Far West, and, if there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris.

“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