Time Remaining: Poems

(Paperback)

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A spry collection of poems reflecting on art, the aging body, and the experiences of a lifetime.

From author James P. Lenfestey comes a playful new collection of poems exploring everyday amazements. Speak to me, bone, / of floating, he compels the hyoid, hidden in the throat. I love you, letters, he confesses to our alphabet. Part travel journal, part curio cabinet, this archive of delights does its best to capture the oceanic rumble and wash of life with a frail net of words.

Lenfestey odes crows and ankles, tennis and jaws. He uplifts the ordinary, finding grace in surprising places: King James, cabbages, Hewlett-Packard. In poems that vary from Neruda-esque concision to the leisurely musings of the Romantics, he celebrates art in its many formsfrom Rembrandt to Springsteen and beyond. Here, no subject is too small or large for the space of a poemeverything is strange and virtuous, even the humble left hand.

Rhythmic, jovial, and eminently approachable, this collection is a love song to the worldand all its complex inhabitants.

Reviews

Praise for A Marriage Book

James Lenfestey, after a lifetime of attentive writing, has lately done poems for family and marriage that put most of us to shame. Gary Snyder, New York Times Book Review

Warning Label:prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted.Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many thingsstories, images, metaphorsbut more than anything else they are alive with rhythm. These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of My Wife Sleeping as I Drive, James P. Lenfestey writes:We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue black sky full /of oncoming lights and stars.How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride!Jim Moore, author of Prognosis

Ive been an avid reader of James P. Lenfesteys work for many years.HisSeeking the Cavewas a wonder.And so is hisMarriage Book, a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the shared heat of love.This is above all a book of transcendence, of celebration.Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem.This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read.Robert Hedin, author of Traveling Light

These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. James Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated. They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight.Chase Twichell, author of Things as It Is

Praise for Seeking the Cave

A lively account of James P. Lenfesteys trip to China, which includes a visit to the cave where Han-shan actually lived, a number of Chinese poems written 1,200 years ago, and poems of his own written on the trail to Cold Mountain. It unites our brief literary life with the ancient richness of Chinese culture.Robert Bly, author of Like the New Moon, I will Live My Life

A profound, and profoundly personal book. Its very captivating, warm and friendly, personal, unguarded, idiosyncratic, pointed but also finally apolitical, and eminently charming.Gary Snyder, author of The Present Moment

James P. Lenfesteys ranging, big-hearted book of pilgrimage and quest recounts the meeting of two poets, one a twentieth-century American, the other a surprisingly gregarious Tang Dynasty hermit known for both his poems of deep solitude and the warmth of his friendships. The story of Lenfesteys late-life search for his own selfs unfolding portrait is, in happy sympathy, replete with deft portraits of others, from the translator-scholars Burton Watson and Bill Porter to the sincere and enterprising Buddhist nuns opening a new shrine and its accompanying gift shop.Seeking the Caveintertwines landscape and language, poetry and prose, foodstuffs and culture, and above all, the explorations of inner life made outward, step by step, on the steep paths of Chinas cities and mountains.Jane Hirshfield, author of Ledger

Author Bio

James P. Lenfestey is the author ofSeeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, a Minnesota Book Award finalist, and multiple collections of essays and poems, includingA Marriage Book. He is also the editor of multiple anthologies, includingRobert Bly in This World.Lenfestey is a former college English instructor, alternative school administrator, marketing communications consultant, and editorial writer for theStar Tribune, where he won several Page One awards for excellence. As a journalist, he covers education, energy policy, and climate science. He is chair of theLiterary Witnessespoetry series, teaches at the Mackinac Island Poetry Festival, and lives in Minneapolis with his wife.