“Written in a series of cells that are reminiscent of the cells of days, and the larger field of the month as time amounts across a cycle of reckoning, the poems In The Year of Our Making & Unmaking are subtly evocative of space, and movement, specifically of the archaic notion of rhythm that is not a regular measure or dance, but rather improvised, and provisional shapes we’re able to compose out of and against the overall (and overwhelming) flow of bodies in the world. The visual prosody of the poems opens up our reading through this elsewhere rhythm: ‘On some / plateau // in the / distance // the universe // is a flower,’ is not exactly a gesture the poem literally holds if we’re playing by the rules, reading left to right, top to bottom; it is, however, one of many such constellations, epiphanies of language & image that this book makes possible for the reader to alight upon and experience as a momentary freedom, a heaven in a wild flower.”

“Friends, read this slim wonder of a book. Urgent, moving, and restlessly inventive, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking is both an accounting of and reckoning with mortality, beauty, and love. Frederick Speers constructs a physical body for time itself—a body that breathes, breaks, thrives, and passes right before our eyes in the shapes the poems make on the page. Elegies, love songs, and pastorals find new incarnations in Speers’ hands. This is a book to brand our hearts, dazzle our minds, and refresh our sense of what a poem can be.”

“Speers’ poems take place in a time that’s circular and layered, offering us ‘old and new ways of being.’ Months are blue, receptive, spilling one into the next, thin skinned. Months may make promises that outline failure, or refuse to play the field, or visit old haunts. Hours chart everything from moral failings to a Black-capped chickadee at the bird-feeder. Moving deftly from fear and sorrow to vast, blooming hope, Speers makes music and sense of an inimitable version of our world, one we are making even as it makes us. One ‘making me feel/ like all you’ve/ made in the field,/ a flower feeling I’ve made.’ This collection is wild with life.”

“Even more resonant upon a year of immutable losses, In the Year of Our Making & Unmaking is a meditation on the limits of the human body: the distance between us—void of human contact, in a field of buildings—where only the sea is heard ‘echoing the sky.’ It is in the natural world that we find solace, in the company of ‘the wildflowers/ with their different, if somewhat repetitive play/ up & down the quiet median.’ Another day in quarantine, now made clearer by the absence of human interaction, where the memory of each other makes the next moment possible. Speers perceives a world that is dark yet made meaningful through memory.”