Book Review: Long Rules

Long Rules

An Essay in Verse

by Nathaniel Perry

Pub Date 01 Nov 2021 | Archive Date 31 Oct 2021

University of Nebraska Press, The Backwaters Press

Poetry

I am reviewing a copy of Long Rules through University of Nebraska Press, The Backwaters Press:

Long Rules is a book length poem divided into six sections. Long Rules takes readers to five Trappist monasteries in the southeastern United States to consider the intersections of solitude, family, music, and landscape. Its lines unspool in a loose and echoing blank verse that investigates monastic rules, as well as everything from sunlight, Saint Basil, turnips, Thomas Merton, saddle-backed caterpillars, John Prine, fatherhood, and everything in between.

Long Rules is about looking inside and outside the self, Perry asks, what, or whom, are we serving? Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, this essay in verse contemplates the meaning of solitude and its contemporary ramifications in a time of uncertainty.

I give Long Rules five out of five stars!

Happy Reading!