Overview

Totality & Temporality, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's elegies, explores what it means to be human through an engagement with memory, time, and space, but also through cosmic imagery, interpretations of quantum physics, Jungian psychology, philosophy, and other modes of inquiry, all of which feel through the precarity of human life in its radical contingency. Each elegy addresses moments, memories, and images of Ryan David Leack's daughter, the figure around which the poems orbit. Moments contour human experience through personal events-her birth, growth, education, and so forth-each of which speaks to the larger human condition. Thus, Leack's meditation on her life becomes a meditation on his own-on existence, meaning, space, place, change, and growth.

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Reviews

Ryan Leack's Totality & Temporality is an act of life writing, one might even say a poetry of confession, but it is more than that. It's a poetry of being and relation, of memory and absence, of exploring the parameters of being ""here."" In a flow of language that is never less than beautiful, this sequence pays passionate attention to personal events as well as an ever-present, indeterminate ""glowing in the darkness."" -Steven Gould Axelrod, Distinguished Professor of Graduate Division, University of California, Riverside, co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Contemporary Poetry Cosmic, paradoxical, and surprising! Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Time and Space marks off time through a series of entanglements that trace the steps toward loss. Stardust and sunflowers, clouds and alluvium, ancient stone and touchstone, red umbrella and boundless sea link up across the vast expanse, as matter circulates and re-circulates in space-from outward manifestations to the interiority of the mind. The poetry dwells in the liminal, the aporetic, the subconscious, as space becomes a metaphor to plumb the depths of the self-the conscious mind in tension with the unconscious-Janus-like binaries, swerving from Wordsworth and Eliot to Heidegger. Original, inventive, and cryptic reverberations of meaning! -Dewey W. Hall, Professor of English, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, author of Materialist Romanticism: The Matter of the Marbles In his debut poetry collection, Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Space and Time, Ryan Leack draws on the expansive languages of physics and philosophy to make sense of the most intimate and embodied of human experiences: the birth and childhood of his daughter. From the cosmic improbability of conception (that this cluster of atoms, here, now, should have brooked entropy to coalesce and form his daughter in the womb of time) to the ache of wanting to stop time's proverbial wingéd chariot from charging forward (""And joy is hard when we are the time/that is passing""), these elegies are compelling spiritual exercises, at once tender and learned. -Ellen Wayland-Smith, Professor of Writing, University of Southern California, author The Science of Last Things

Author Information

Dr. Ryan David Leack is an Assistant Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California. He's published poetry in Chiron Review, Poetry Quarterly, Tipton Poetry Journal, Pif, and Westwind, among other journals, and served as Editor-in-Chief of Pomona Valley Review for seven years, to which he is now an adviser. He has published academic work in several journals and has written five instrumental albums, including two film scores, used in film and television in over fifty countries, including on CBS, CNN, HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and elsewhere.

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