Day for Night

Richard Deming, senior lecturer in English

(Shearsman Books)

“Day for Night,” Richard Deming’s new collection of poems, takes its title from the cinematic term for shooting night scenes during the day. With a complex lyricism, these poems often explore the ways that art, in whatever form, creates the possibilities of an address by which we hope to encounter other people even as it reveals the impossibilities of ever truly knowing others or ourselves. Haunting the poems in echoes and allusions is Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and that play’s meditation on skepticism and the role of art in knowing the self. The poems bring together high and pop culture, hope and loss, loneliness and belonging, melancholy and transcendence. Poems from this collection have appeared in The Nation, The Iowa Review, The Colorado Review, and American Letters & Commentary, among other publications.