Pre-Order from White Stag Publishing
THE LONG NOW
Phoenix, AZ: White Stag Publishing, 2026
The Long Now is a bracing, radiant book—at once intimate and vast—alive to grief, love, history, and deep time. James Meetze writes with urgency and lyric force, moving from the body to the planetary with a rare musical intelligence. Bold, searching, and emotionally alive, these poems stay awake to the world as it breaks and remakes itself. The Long Now is a work of luminous attention—an invitation to remain awake inside history, to feel the weight of the moment, and to answer it with imagination, humility, and song.
PETER GIZZI, author of Fierce Elegy
winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize
The Long Now shimmers into focus “in the hotel wifi air,” tripping on its (green) tongue, “waking now within / culture’s long slumber.” James Meetze’s new collection is a spiralling meteorology of temporality and temper, fog and fracture, hunger and home, want and wonder, memory and multiplicity. Here, we encounter the self as spectral accretion, as glittering through its milieu. Moving between inevitability and possibility; Meetze deals deftly in that “ambrosial oblivion of if.” There are runes, clocks and cards. Truth appears for a hot second as a tiny hidden crab. This is a work without a proper ending: “It will call you back / into your truest / openmost / uncanny / self.”
—SABEEN CHAUDRY, author of Rimming the Event Horizon
In The Long Now, James Meetze maps the oscillations of eros as an endless give-and-take, flickering between presence and absence across deep time. Meetze asks what it means to love, to be “twinned / and prismatic” at once. One feels the rigorous and attuned thinking-through that happens across this sequence as stunning syntactical suspension opens into diamond-hard aphorism. As it was for Ovid, change is Meetze’s theme. For now, he has changed that grand story to one in which the Orphic speaker and the beloved, forever caught between states, have found their thread.
—RICHARD GREENFIELD, author of Subterranean and Tracer
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this visionary work, James Meetze deepens his investigation into time, language, and moral attention. Unfolding across forty interlinked sections, The Long Now tracks time at multiple scales—personal grief, political fracture, digital delirium, and the slow patience of stone—asking what it means to be present inside forces that exceed us. These poems are less attuned to prophecy than séance, less forecast than deep listening: an ear pressed to history’s pressure and intimacy’s cost.
Moving through clocks and ruins, screens and myth, daily labor and lyric fracture, Meetze treats language as both wound and instrument. Words falter, loop, shimmer, and bruise; yet they still cling to breath, memory, and the body. The sequence resists resolution in favor of orientation, testing love, work, masculinity, nation, ecology, and faith not for purity but for use. Haunted by futures it will never inhabit and pasts that refuse burial, The Long Now understands time as weather one learns by standing in it—and answers not with comfort, but with vigilance, abrasion, and a low, enduring chant.