Gerald Fleming's most recent books are The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press, San Francisco) and Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems (Hanging Loose). From 1995-2000 he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review, and is currently editing both the limited-edition vitreous magazine One (More) Glass and The Collected Prose and Poetry of Lawrence Fixel. Fleming taught in the San Francisco public schools for thirty-seven years and has written three books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). He lives part of the year in Paris.

Books by Gerald Fleming:

Other poems on the web by Gerald Fleming:
"Long Marriage"
"Bone & Silence"
Two poems
Two poems

About One:

"Gerald Fleming is a remarkable writer, made more so by his commitment to the prose poem, a form which at its best, as here, is a delicious treat on almost every occasion. His new volume, One, takes on the monosyllable and wrestles it into dizzying and wonderful pretzel-esque works which may appear, at first glance, non-pretzel-esque. You'll probably love this book as much as I do."
—Frederick Barthelme

"At times wry and wickedly self-aware, these linked prose vignettes deepen into a resonant, searching meditation on that which resides hidden within us-metastatic cells, racism we've spent half our years unlearning, the slow burn of our lives. Fleming's voice is rich with a plainspoken elegance that evokes flickers of Ovid ("the years fled from her face," he writes in elegy) or the quieted mind of a Gerard Manley Hopkins who's made peace with his god and is engaged in the contemplative practice of ordinary life. In this almost-Oulipian project, poet and speaker both gently interrogate language and self, "take each shred down from the line/sew it to the next, soak it in brine/look at it/see that it means in ways we've not known-now finds us, & like us it's scarred now, but still ours-back in our mouths, on our tongues-quick birds!-flung into the air of our time." One is a powerful collection woven of grief, compassion, and the joy of a life well lived. Sidling up against fiction's narrative drive, it's told in a reinvented sprung rhythm sure and steady as a heartbeat, as the beat of one's own footsteps."
—Miriam Bird Greenberg