Ebook: Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays

"Richardson is well-known for his five previous volumes of poetry and for his critical work. Along with new poems, this book includes a large selection of aphorisms, which have brought him a whole new audience. They are witty, profound, and often very funny."

"James Richardson's _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, very shrewd. “It can never be satisfied, the mind, never,’ wrote Wallace Stevens. _Vectors_ is a remarkable testament to such questing, vivid minding, as these aphorisms alight on everything from the nature of perception, to God, success, fear, shame, self-consciousness, love and friendship.“ There is no virgin past. The mind is like one of those floating islands of vegetation whose roots grasp not the earth but each other,” he writes. And: “As hard as other people are to talk to, I’m glad I don't have to sit next to myself.’ And: “Let me have my dreams but not what I dream of.’ Such incisive expressions remind us why Pascal believed so passionately that aphorisms have a particularly uncanny way of engraving themselves so deeply on our memory. From the time Hippocrates coined the term ‘aphorism’ and published his first one, “Life is short, Art long,” this is an art form that has periodically renewed itself with astonishing results. _Vectors_ can now be added to the short list of such works that will truly last." —Laurie Sheck

"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."— The 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

James Richardson's poetry includes _Reservations_, _Second Guesses_, _As If_, _A Suite for Lucretians_, and _How Things Are_. He is the author of two critical studies, _Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Necessity_, and _Vanishing Lives: Tennyson, Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats_; his essays and aphorisms have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He teaches at Princeton University.