For the Duration by Heather Flescher from Collapse Press
Heather Flescher’s For the Duration is a collection that refuses distance. It is not content to be admired from afar as an exercise in craft alone; it insists on intimacy. Through a blend of narrative poetry, memoir, prose-poems, and personal reflection, Flescher creates a work that documents disability, gender identity, mental illness, trauma, activism, memory, and survival with unusual directness and emotional precision.
The collection’s greatest strength is its commitment to radical honesty. Flescher writes from lived experience, but she rarely confines herself to simple autobiography. Again and again, she discovers inventive frameworks through which readers can inhabit experiences that might otherwise remain inaccessible. The title poem, “For the Duration,” imagines the reader sentenced to spend twenty-four hours inside the poet’s body, receiving bureaucratic instructions on how to manage chronic fatigue syndrome, PTSD, psoriasis, medication, and gender transition. What begins as satire evolves into an act of profound empathy, transforming disability and trans experience from abstract concepts into immediate realities.
Empathy is the governing force throughout the book. Even when examining intensely personal struggles, Flescher continually broadens her perspective outward. In “Mop and Glow,” a memory of passengers humiliating a Greyhound station janitor becomes an examination of power, complicity, and moral cowardice. In “Peak,” reflections on a stunning Nicaraguan sunset collide with memories of visiting a memorial to victims of the Contra War, creating a powerful meditation on privilege, grief, and political responsibility. The poet consistently asks not only how suffering affects the self, but what obligations it creates toward others.
The collection is particularly effective when addressing transgender identity. Poems such as “Gemstones” and “Behind Bill” move beyond personal testimony to investigate the cultural narratives that shape public perceptions of trans lives. Flescher traces the cumulative effects of countless small acts of erasure while simultaneously celebrating the rare affirmations that become lifelines. These poems avoid abstraction; they are grounded in concrete memories, popular culture, and lived encounters, making their arguments emotionally persuasive rather than merely ideological.
Stylistically, Flescher favors clarity over obscurity. Readers seeking dense linguistic experimentation or highly elliptical imagery may find the poems surprisingly straightforward. Yet that directness is a deliberate aesthetic choice. The conversational voice allows the emotional and ethical stakes of the work to remain fully visible. When metaphor appears — as in “Man Down,” “Flutter,” or “Unpearling”—it emerges organically from the narrative rather than calling attention to itself. The result is poetry that is spoken rather than performed, intimate rather than ornamental.
The collection’s willingness to linger inside difficult experiences is both a strength and, at times, a challenge. Poems such as “Husk,” with its harrowing exploration of psoriasis and self-loathing, are difficult to read because they refuse comforting shortcuts. Flescher trusts readers to remain present in discomfort. While some sections could benefit from greater compression, the accumulation of detail often serves the larger project: bearing witness without simplification.
What ultimately distinguishes For the Duration is its moral imagination. Flescher writes as someone deeply aware of suffering yet unwilling to surrender to cynicism. Even the collection’s darkest moments contain an undercurrent of resilience, community, and mutual care. The poems repeatedly return to the possibility that understanding another person’s reality—even briefly—can become an act of resistance against isolation and dehumanization.
For the Duration is a courageous and compassionate collection that combines memoir, social critique, and lyric reflection into a cohesive whole. It offers readers not only a portrait of one life but an invitation to practice empathy more fully. By the final pages, Flescher has accomplished something increasingly rare: she has made vulnerability feel not merely confessional, but transformative. A moving, politically aware, and deeply humane collection whose emotional honesty leaves a lasting impression.
For the Duration by Heather Flescher is available for purchase at https://www.amazon.com/Duration-Heather-Flescher/dp/B0GQCWSKFN/
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
