Cover photograph by David Lynch; cover design by Megan Mangum, Words that Work.

In Let's Not Call It Consequence, Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poems, the poet brings together abstraction and precise images to explore the intensities and reversals of lyric thinking, that "infinitely stuttering
thing." These poems searchingly engage the content and form of anger, violence, intimacy, and the poetics of proximity, exploring the intricacies of language use to find the ways that "to ache, so to speak, is human."

Richard Deming's first full-length collection of poetry, Let's Not Call it Consequence, was published in February 2008 by Shearsman Books.

“If only/this thinking thing thought thoughts only.” Richard Deming restlessly calculates the split between promised and actual experience. The poems in his impressive new collection balance at an edge of danger syntax can only shadow. Urgency of the day. Argument of the ordinary. “Each / comma ticks like sleet against / a windowpane. In the cold dawn.” --Susan Howe

The real so immediate in its violence and vexations, yet at the same time so fugitive in its ever-shifting surfaces, its sensuous appeal, its fraught moments of desire and despair: how tell of it while dwelling fully within its myriad currents? And always the poem to come, “a desperate ink,” – will the page accept this “tune / beyond geometry,” beyond fixed measures? Richard Deming addresses the open questions, and the resonant field between dream and reason, with a poet's passionate stutter. If the straight way be lost, there yet remains the winding path through “a brief, almost beautiful world.” --Michael Palmer

From “a haze of black flies thickens beneath magnesium streetlights” to nothing candles the heart so much as loss,” Richard Deming makes out of “the tiny light of fugitive things” astonishing revelations. The voice in these poems keenly registers the synaptic shifts and zigzags of perception that make each poem a continual unfolding. Let's Not Call It Consequence is a delightful and remarkable debut. --Arthur Sze

It is sometimes said that poetry and philosophy are unhealthy for each other. Proving the rule or not, this book is an exception. Deming's beautiful, tight and firmly-crafted, intelligent, linguistically-inventive poems relentlessly question the everyday mysteries (“Open the door and see, / how near is / knowledge”) behind everyday events. “Then, what and is / any ever / ever enough?” he asks, probing the roots of Lyric in the plots of unremitting, unquestioning tragedy. The questions are Socratic; the answers pre-Socratic. Realism combines here with utopian hope: “I want an answer more generous than this, / since meaning is no machine, but a luck / good as the promise / of a brief, almost beautiful world.” Deming's originality of vision can only be born of a true poet's long maturing in Nietzsche's “profound speechlessness of pregnancy.” Here the pregnancy speaks in a difficult time. This is a brilliant first book. --Nathaniel Tarn