Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Time and Space

Totality & Temporality, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's elegies, explores what it means to be human through an engagement with memory, time, and space, but also through cosmic imagery, interpretations of quantum physics, Jungian psychology, philosophy, and other modes of inquiry, all of which feel through the precarity of human life in its radical contingency. Each elegy addresses moments, memories, and images of Ryan David Leack's daughter, the figure around which the poems orbit. Moments contour human experience through personal events-her birth, growth, education, and so forth-each of which speaks to the larger human condition. Thus, Leack's meditation on her life becomes a meditation on his own-on existence, meaning, space, place, change, and growth.