Books by Richard Deming

This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us about Creativity

This Exquisite Loneliness is a transformative book for understanding this moment of collective isolation. Through his sharp-edged personal reflections, Deming interrogates powerfully and openly his own sense of aloneness as he weaves his discoveries with fellow writers, artists, and thinkers from Walter Benjamin to Zora Neale Hurston. …Through Deming’s brave and searing prose, This Exquisite Loneliness builds an eloquent case for staying with the discomfort as darkness becomes the passageway toward illumination.”—Terry Tempest Williams, author of The Moon Is Behind Us

Touch of Evil // BFI Film Classics by Richard Deming

“In this contribution to the BFI Film Classics series, Richard Deming explores what makes Touch of Evil so intricate and so knowing as a parable of idealism dying many deaths… Deming ably conveys just how visceral the film is.” — Time Literary Supplement

Art of the Ordinary: The Everyday Domain of Art, Film, Philosophy, and Poetry

A trailblazing, cross-disciplinary engagement with the ordinary and the everyday. ―Critics at Large

Day for Night

“In the poems collected in Day for Night, an intensity of focus pulls from the flux of experience—from film, art, music, poetics, weather and memory—occasions for reverent attention. … Richard Deming is a master of observed and imagined near reversals: artifice to real, transcendent promise to thwarted sublime, day for night: a poetic chiaroscuro of hope, dread, wonder, love and sorrow. ‘Still, there’s the moon and those stars.’ Mostly: wonder.” —Ann Lauterbach

Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading

"Overall, the focus of Deming's study is refined and often brilliant, most especially in the freshness it brings to the poetics of Emerson." —The Wallace Stevens Journal

Let’s Not Call It Consequence

"'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.