博客來In KG Newman’s fifth collection of poems, Time Billionaire is simultaneously in reverence of, and at war with, the clock. The book examines how time is our most important asset, and through the lenses of self-identity, love, fatherhood and the finite nature of being, how the memories we develop ultimately are our most precious commodity.
This collection is a counter-balance to smartphones, the fleeting feelings brought by our technology-driven lives and the impermanence of our closest relationships. It is the bottling of the alpenglow as sons outgrow gloves. Each poem presents a penny for every second left, and those pennies stack up into an infinite oil rig, jacked up way out in the ocean. Because when everything feels like a jumping hour, it’s only natural to take our watches apart and hide their pieces around the house. It only feels right to drink the clepsydras dry.
In his effort to balance time and memory, and become a seed and the sun at once, Newman finds the wives we almost lost, and they’re putting on lipstick again. He harnesses an hourglass on a string, spinning in the wind. He recognizes the grandfather clock as an elegant weapon, while concurrently putting the atomic clock in a half-nelson as he waits for a bird to fly by so he can turn it back into a fledgling.
This book, in its essence, is the place to save the prior minute’s version of oneself and everything that’s held dear: Pennies as memories scattered in a mirage off in the distance, and if you squint long and hard enough, they take the shape of a sequoia. It is a must-read for anyone who, through love and loss and a pure willpower to seep in beautiful small moments, lives a full existence to the creeping background sounds of a requiem score.
