Moment

Author: Stephen Ratcliffe 

Publisher: Spuytin Duyvil (2025)

"Reading from any of Ratcliffe’s books seems to slow time down. We’re not rushed along by the plot. We can dip in and out anywhere and not feel lost. We become more attentive to incremental changes. Maybe the poems carry an understated Buddhist acknowledgment of the coming and going of life and death and of all phenomena, but never in a didactic way. The phrases that are reused and rearranged over and over create a rhythmic rendering of intimate space and time—this particular space from which seeing takes place, this particular moment in which thinking occurs. And so the structure of the book reshapes our experience. We are given to share a point of view, an angle of inquiry. We rock back and forth with the writing, outside and inside a mediated space. Inside, outside. We bob back and forth on the waves of writing. The Aztecs believed that the world had ended several times already, by fire, by flood, etc. In our time, they predicted, the world would come to an end due to motion. Perhaps, against our hurried cultural drift, Ratcliffe’s colossal but anchored writing practice takes on a profound spiritual, political, and philosophical importance. John Cage famously noted, 'If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.'" 
 

—Forrest Gander