Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity - Poetry by William Reichard

Publication Date: June 21, 2016
Paperback, 72 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-24-3

Available from Small Press Distribution

At one point in his poem “The Crows,” an achingly poignant remembrance of his dying sister, William Reichard observes that

Silence is the secret language in our family, the long gaps
between what we can and cannot say.

In the poem that opens this new collection, he also admits to a “learned / willful” blindness as a coping mechanism for dealing with a world where “things change” – an urge to evasion so that

I will never turn into the man
I don't want to become.

Silence and blindness might seem an unpromising beginning for poetry. But then Reichard responds through his masterful juxtaposition in “A Trip Down Market Street” of flickering silent movie images of a doomed San Francisco with his own experience of that city as a place of exhilarating possibility even in the face of the AIDS epidemic:

I had a sense this might never end
and that was beautiful enough for me.

The hope inherent in that powerful phrase might never end propels Reichard through these poems just as the two men of his title are propelled passionately toward their unattainable goal. It is the effort and not the end that matters, and here that effort takes the form of words and images that answer the silence and the darkness with the eloquent simplicity of ordinary life. Including – it must still be said – the ordinariness of gay love, expressed so perfectly in his poem “Sixteen.” We have all been there, just as we have all seen the ghosts of people and places that haunt these poems, remnants and reminders of a world passing and past. And still, it is beautiful enough.


Praise for William Reichard’s Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity:

The poems in William Reichard's Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity are not nostalgic, but still they ache keenly for a place and time long gone, ache for the Midwestern landscape with "no trees anymore—not enough to cut," ache for cattails and slow tractors, for men lost to the plague of AIDs and a sister who died waiting far too long for a new set of lungs. Here you'll find mown cornfields and lakes frozen over with sexual longing and silence—an often-overlooked landscape of this country (and the heart) made visible with an unflinching awareness. "Everything that has the will / to bloom," Reichard writes, "is a flower." Here then is his riot, his spring, his will, fierce and evident on every page.
—Nickole Brown


"There's no sound but our breathing, and the paddle as it strokes the water." Accept the offered craft of William Reichard's transport. Put your oar in with his erotic lyricism, his mouth to your ears. Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity is a steady ride through the wonderous landscape of a Midwestern rural American childhood, a turn at the bend of Gravelly Run, a pass by Baudelairean gallows, and a final glide to "listen to the wind in the reeds along the lakeshore, how they lash the air, how they sing."
—Scott Hightower


"So the world won’t lose them / I speak the names of those / I love aloud to the darkness. / Now they are safe." These lines from William Reichard’s latest book, Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity, express one of its recurring themes: the attempt of the poet to create something that time cannot destroy. In a book filled with doubles, doppelgangers, ghosts and echoes, everything that was is always happening now (or about to happen): "the atoms of all that’s / been / all that / is, / all that / will be / merge in the darkness." Two Men Rowing... is the testimony of a man who, from the very start, admits, "I know things change" and still goes on to describe the people and places he’s loved in such moving detail that we love them too.
—Joyce Stuphen