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James Richardson is the author of numerous poetry collections, including By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, and During, winner of the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as the best book in progress. Among his honors are the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Emily Dickinson Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and teaches at Princeton University.

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Very Late

An iPoem

by James Richardson
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Even our tenderest

buds and shoots
(though we are pained)
endure unharmed
People on couch
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