All I Feel Is Rivers

Robert Vivian is a professor of English and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan and teaches as a core faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of four novels as well as two essay collections, Cold Snap as Yearning and The Least Cricket of Evening, all available from the University of Nebraska Press, as well as the collection of dervish essays, Immortal Soft-Spoken.

• Acknowledgments How Precious Still Even ThenAll the Rivers of My DaysYesSoul InkWater Is My NameOther DarksO After OBellTo Beg Mercy of a ShadowI Who Wake Beside YouOrdering a Book of PoemsDear SyllablesFish MeLet a PoemPleaBecause of What My Brother Told MeAny WordBright Windowsill the WonderingAnother Kind of WakingDovelikeEssay Transparent Almost to MidnightThe Woman in MeEven IfDithyrambEssay as the World’s Worst JewelerMaybe Fall to My KneesI Write With the RiverHow Shall I Owl the SoundBring the RiverPenThe Waft-Away WorldLight Upon LightlyA Kind of Inner RussiaBecause There Are GhostsCome EarthwardEssay by the Black SeaGobsmack EssayInk of RiverKeeper BeesLetter to NerudaMother ForeverPlayRead to YouSomewhere a SirenSome Kind of HolinessWhen Water This EarthTell Me FlowerThe Most WokeSo Wild BelovedGaze of a ChildAll I Feel Is RiversGod-HusksBecoming Less So

"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