Time is absurd. It can be blissfully light, and crushingly endless. If it’s the latter, you might find yourself drowning in hours, suffocated by swelling moments and the past leaking and everything too much everywhere. But mostly, time is structure. It’s how you meet your friend for lunch before the café closes, count the days until that Special Event, or consider your ancestors from centuries ago. So, what does it look like when time loses its form? When linearity crumbles and its boundaries dissolve?

I began writing my debut poetry book, Sticky Time, during a month that felt like it might never end. I was in the throes of a depressive episode and the worst eczema flare of my life. So, I wrote to process, to control. I ate hours and spat them back up—through the absurdity came some calm. I also became obsessed with “eternalism,” a concept that past, present, and future all happen at once, but our consciousness only has access to the present. Much of Sticky Time explores the psychic implications of this idea, as well as the aforementioned blending of temporal sensory experiences. I picture time as this web-like filter over reality, glistening with my past and future selves. I hold a piece of the web in my hand, and it tells me truths and lies and laughs and the smell of rain takes me to summer camp and a Fleetwood Mac song takes me to that roadtrip and it’s all divine. Because it’s all here, in time, begging to be written.

The eight poetry books below similarly experiment with time. They take back control by distorting its rules, highlighting its subjectivity, and reducing it to a fragmented putty. Poetry gives us the power to play, and through this manipulation, conjure a little temporal synesthesia. Each of these books holds a crooked mirror to the infinite ways we experience time, reconciling what it means to exist in and exert agency over its wobbly bounds.

Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere by Anastacia-Reneé

Resurrection, reincarnation, reinvention, revisitation. In Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, Anastacia-Reneé gives us a multi-dimensional tapestry filled with Black woman gods, time-jumpers, and parallel universes. This is an “everywhen” book. We meet lovers communicating across lifetimes; we enter the Atlantic Apartments, where access to the year 1984 is granted through a sign that reads, “where’s the beef?” We even hear from one speaker about “The Museum of a Long, Long, Time Ago,” where they experience love, joy, anxiety, and fear through pills from a distant era—our present. With metaphysical composition, Anastacia-Reneé contorts linearity beyond recognition, creating a stunning, surreal collection of boundary-pushing Afrofuturism. Mystical and inescapable. 

Crush by Richard Siken

Crush is a tragic, liminal space. In it, Siken constructs a timeless reality as the speaker panics through grief and fantasy, yearning for his dead lover. This heartbreak manifests in his tireless manipulation of time as a wish to reunite with his beloved. Over and over, he grants himself the role of director for the scenes in his life, craving the ability to pause, replay, and change his fated path. In “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out,” Siken writes, “You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say.” This obsession bleeds through the collection, building to a psychedelic trip in “You Are Jeff.” There, we are transported to a dreamlike scenario that iterates, looping backwards and sideways until landing in a dark car with a beautiful boy. All throughout Crush, time runs, slips, and disintegrates under Siken’s pen as the speaker moves closer to acceptance. A gut-wrenching, beautiful read.

The Past by Wendy Xu

With experimental flare, The Past stretches and folds memory through intergenerational narratives. The collection opens with the poem “Coming to America,” where Xu writes, “They spoke to me in heavy abstraction / My tongue fading out / Sometimes a mouth is lost to slow time.” Underlying these poems is a fraught attitude towards the temporal. She describes time as boring and violent; she “decapitates” the past, refusing to be limited by its restraints. Rightfully so. In portraying her family’s immigration, she uses censorship-inspired styles that reflect the Chinese government’s surveillance. And in “Tiananmen Sonnets,” Xu conceals the massacre’s date within each poem, accompanied by symbolic visuals. The complexities of heritage are on full display here, as she grapples with personal, familial, and historical strands of time. In “Why Write,” she asserts “I am not writing to photograph the past. I am writing to sit inside the pauses of Uncle’s sentences, the commas of the dead.” So in those pauses we will join her.

disgust by Emji Saint Spero

disgust spins our speaker through a week of degradation orchestrated by an unseen dom figure. Born from an audio transcript of a performance piece, the book is an epic, grotesque confessional poem. The text is split into seven days, each with a varying number of intervals. The result is a hyper-present, hyper-immediate narrative. But distorted. Each day, quotidian acts like opening a door, cooking, and dressing are disrupted by the mounting limitations of “d’s” protocol. These limitations also contort the speaker’s concept of time. They lose track of the days and, dislodged, say, “I am can hardly remember anything. Everything is getting lost. I have no writing. It’s hard to speak my mouth isn’t working. I’m tired. Everything in reverse.” The form of transcription, with its stutters, misplaced punctuation, and indistinct muttering, creates an overflowing world of distress. In disgust, Saint Spero envelops us in this one, suffocating week, with little room to escape.

The Snakes Came Back by Lora Mathis

In Lora Mathis’ The Snakes Came Back, the speaker embarks on a profound journey to heal the self, connect with the infinite, and transcend the temporal body. Many of the poems take place in 2020, a year notorious for its disorienting time. Mathis captures the sensation of days blurring and nights looping as the self longs for the past. Each section of the book is separated by the alchemical symbol for “hour,” as personified figures like Dawn, Tomorrow, Day, and Night pull the speaker through her healing journey. And the snakes. They’re everywhere, slithering through the hours, shifting in meaning as the speaker explores the complex interplay between spirit and body. Mathis asks us to reflect on why, if the spirit knows it’s infinite, the body still craves permanence amidst the one-way flow of time. 

The Rupture Tense by Jenny Xie

Jenny Xie’s The Rupture Tense ripples us through time. The book begins with ekphrastic poems that invoke Li Zhensheng’s haunting photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In that past, the speaker finds traces of the future—indicating Xie’s examination of “postmemory,” the concept that trauma can leak through generations. At its core, The Rupture Tense navigates this melting of past, present, and future. With sharp metaphors like, “My present tenses are just basins / where endings approach room temperature,” Xie guides us through a reckoning with both personal and cultural histories. Her fragmented memories of childhood displacement from China, retold in layers, reveal an ungraspable truth left to the past. And through surreal imagery like “Memory pulls the past out of its outlines and stuffs it back in all the wrong spaces,” Xie beautifully manipulates the language of time, exhibiting the visceral weight of history.

A Duration by Richard Meier

Comprised of long, stream-of-consciousness poems, A Duration is concerned with the integration of past selves with the present, nature with humanity, and body with spirit. The poems serve as portals into countless beginnings, each thread evading its end by dropping off mid-sentence and picking up without pause. Meier meditates on rivers, animal tracks, his childhood, his friends, and King Lear, breathing life into temporal abstractions with lines like, “‘Hours hold days in between trees,’ the evening said.” The effect is one of being held by a master storyteller. And the pervasive interplay between time and its subjects suggests the eternal possibility for rebirth. “No self is in control of everything in the body. Nothing happens again. Things again. Things begin,” he writes. A Duration reminds us that time is both linear and fractal, but writing gives us access to everything at once.

pleasureis amiracle by Bianca Rae Messinger

Like playing a song on repeat, Messinger’s pleasureis amiracle seeks infinity in narrow, contained spaces. Here, linear time is repressive, and our speaker is plagued by chronophobia—the fear of time passing. In the face of depression, she crawls into moments in search of pure pleasure, frustrated with time itself and believing that reliving memory is the antidote. Many words are merged without spaces, perhaps indicating a rushed dissatisfaction with the present. In “though it feels like a very long time ago,” Messinger writes, “it’s about free time, some people call it newtime. kinds of waiting go on forever. I call that fading.” The book also experiments with form, using shapes, epistolary poems, and sound to illustrate this concept of betweenness. As this battle with the temporal contends with compression, Messinger continually asks how the speaker can escape her narrow path to finally transcend the crowded moment.