The Phonemes

In The Phonemes, Frances Richard investigates perceptually distinct units of experience, such as sounds, energy surges, and scraps of national and natural history, to create episodes of disruption and dissolution. Organized into sequences that move from seismic notation and wave-form typography to lyric encounters with meteors, snakes, glaciers, and the domestic sublime, the poems break language into its smallest expressive particles and reassemble them at the threshold where sense tips into noise.

Richard’s formal vocabulary is at once scientific and devotional: geological terms collide with fragments of political speech, advertising copy, lullaby, and prayer, while visual scores of nested parentheses, dashes, and radical signs interrupt the page like oscillograph readings of an unstable signal. What emerges is a poetics of phonemic attention, an insistence that a syllable, weather event, or fault line all can carry a full emotional charge and that the task of the poem is to hold open the instant in which raw perception has not yet hardened into meaning.

This title is a second edition, released as part of punctum’s Special Collections(opens in new tab) project.