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    All I Feel Is Rivers
    Dervish Essays

    Robert Vivian (Author)

    9781496220332

    Paperback / softback, published 1 March 2020

    126 pages
    21.6 x 14 x 0.8 cm, 0.178 kg

    "In quick blocks of text that amount to ecstatic prose poetry or a kind of flash nonfiction, Vivian celebrates the living moment, 'the hum and thrum and love of it.'"-New York Times Book Review
    “Line by line, image by image, essay by spiraling essay, Vivian awakens us to the grace of the infinite moment: the shaft of morning light, the teaspoon of honey, the spider on the north-facing wall. All I Feel Is Rivers is a wondrous, transcendent book. Let its currents take you.”-Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams
    “This is the work of a Sufi master of rapturous prose, who dances until his feet do not touch the ground.”-David Wojahn, author of From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry
    “There is a wild innocence in Vivian’s headlong rush to get the language right, but don’t be fooled. These are words spoken by a man who has seen the whole spectrum and who chooses-is it even choice?-to be immersed and re-watered again and again, to make each sentence feel like class V rapids through which we readers, boatless but safe, feel transported, not just from one place to another but from one realm to another. These essays are an exhilarating achievement.”-Barbara Hurd, author of Listening to the Savage: River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies
    “The dervish dance spins us, via Vivian, into yes. Yes to the world. Yes to joy. Yeses as homages to what brings us peace: rain, rivers, vodka, Mandelstam. Yes to the letter O. Yes to sorrow too, and oh yes, to ‘this book of flesh turned on its back . . . to gaze up . . . stars wheeling in the wake of so much dark silence.’”-Nance Van Winckel, author of Our Foreigner

    All I Feel is Rivers is a collection of a new hybrid writing that, though spiritually akin to prose poems, retains an essayistic form.

    After several life-changing trips to Turkey, Robert Vivian took up a deep study of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic, poet, and founder of the religious order that performs the now-famous dervish dance. Vivian’s fascination seeped into his writing, and his newly conceived dervish essays reflect the dynamic movement and ancient symbolism of the ritual dance with wild lyricism, sometimes breathless cadences, and mesmerizing unspooling.
                  
    Utterly fearless in their passionate avowals of life’s many manifestations, these essays showcase the surprising connectivity between the sacred and profane, uncovered by associative drifting. Vivian’s essays take on grief and loss, the natural world and climate, spirituality and ecstasy, all while pushing the boundaries of what prose can do.
                  

    Acknowledgments 
    How Precious Still 
    Even Then
    All the Rivers of My Days
    Yes
    Soul Ink
    Water Is My Name
    Other Darks
    O After O
    Bell
    To Beg Mercy of a Shadow
    I Who Wake Beside You
    Ordering a Book of Poems
    Dear Syllables
    Fish Me
    Let a Poem
    Plea
    Because of What My Brother Told Me
    Any Word
    Bright Windowsill the Wondering
    Another Kind of Waking
    Dovelike
    Essay Transparent Almost to Midnight
    The Woman in Me
    Even If
    Dithyramb
    Essay as the World’
    s Worst Jeweler
    Maybe Fall to My Knees
    I Write With the River
    How Shall I Owl the Sound
    Bring the River
    Pen
    The Waft-Away World
    Light Upon Lightly
    A Kind of Inner Russia
    Because There Are Ghosts
    Come Earthward
    Essay by the Black Sea
    Gobsmack Essay
    Ink of River
    Keeper Bees
    Letter to Neruda
    Mother Forever
    Play
    Read to You
    Somewhere a Siren
    Some Kind of Holiness
    When Water This Earth
    Tell Me Flower
    The Most Woke
    So Wild Beloved
    Gaze of a Child
    All I Feel Is Rivers
    God-Husks
    Becoming Less So
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