“Elegiac, compassionate, movingly wise, Lex Runciman’s new poems offer lyric proofs of a moment’s multiplicity, the multitude of givens in any given moment. Runciman’s world of haunting tropes and music is one in which “Hope wears a sweater with deep pockets./ Despair plays a distant flute in the dark.” This splendid collection’s particulars fulfill the promise made in one poem’s title: encountering these poems, a reader will find that “no one goes unamazed.” No one.” - Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate
“In One Hour That Morning we find the whole spectrum of ordinary tragedy and excruciatingly particularized joy, brought to us in a language like cold water over stones, all flourish replaced by clarity, all depiction a kind of painterly ekphrasis, a careful entrance, breath almost held, as though to preserve the momentariness that is the only possibility of perfection in this life. Lex Runciman has given us a book that is wise and beautiful and that the years will not tarnish.” - Christopher Howell
The urgency underlying these quiet poems reveals how the eye and imagination can, must, or perhaps simply will, remake the world.
Born and raised in Portland, Lex Runciman has lived most of his life in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.