James Richardson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, and During, winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as the best book in progress. Among his honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Emily Dickinson Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and teaches at Princeton University.

Three Poems

by James Richardson

Echo

And since she could only say back what she heard,
she had to listen for what she needed to say.
She haunted the edges of school yards first. Not it.
Lover’s lanes: hopeless. Cell phones seemed promising,
but really. She started reading novels
to put herself in the way of secret lives. It was the old story,
speed that was made to be followed, not repeated:
she remembered the ends of sentences, of sentences.

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