The Enemies of Leisure Hardcover – May 18, 2021 by John Gery

The poems in The Enemies of Leisure wonder about the odd paradoxes of pleasure and mindfulness, leisure and labor, invisibility and truth. Mixing traditional and open forms, as well as high and low idioms, these poems’ symmetry depends on remaining always precise without making too much sense. “No things / without the ideas we call them by,” proclaims the opening poem, “American Ghost,” inverting Williams’s dictum not to undermine the dominant aesthetic principle of modern American poetry but to turn it inside out, to make room for a poetry that oscillates between the ghostly presence of thought and the constant fading of experience.

Established in 1985 by Robert McDowell and Mark Jarman, Story Line Press gained an international reputation as a press that championed narrative and formal poetry, innovative anthologies, and criticism written in a public voice rather than academic style. Despite limited resources, Story Line became one of the most influential literary presses of the era publishing new and established writers.

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