Description: A book-length poem in six sections, Long Rules takes readers to five Trappist monasteries in the southeastern United States to consider the intersections of solitude, family, music, and landscape. Its lines unspool in a loose and echoing blank verse that investigates monastic rules, sunlight, Saint Basil, turnips, Thomas Merton, saddle-backed caterpillars, John Prine, fatherhood, and everything in between. Looking inside and outside the self, Perry asks, what, or whom, are we serving? Winner of the Backwaters Prize in Poetry, this essay in verse contemplates the meaning of solitude and its contemporary ramifications in a time of uncertainty.
Review Quotes: "Nathaniel Perry's Long Rules is a gentle doctrinal essay exploring the mystery by which collectivity authors solitude and prayer invents the world. . . . Long Rules is so profound and beautiful that, but for the casual asides to the reader and references to contemporary singers, I would half think it was the lost work of some wise soul from the deep past."--Jennifer Moxley, author of Druthers and The Open Secret