Manual : The First Hundred

Manual, the sixth volume in the ongoing series of Richard Berengarten's Selected Writings, is an ambitious work-in-progress, a single poem, whose central theme is human hands. This present collation is divided into five sequences and subdivided into one hundred small poems, with two frame-pieces at the start and end. Numerological patterning, an articulated feature of much of Berengarten's writing, occurs in each poem's formal structure: ten lines, ten fingers; two stanzas, two hands.