Tempo Rubato is profound lamentation pressed throughout with eros and vitality. Here the body suffers, touches another body, holds the desiring self, the self acutely aware of its own necessary embodiment: clothed and unclothed, robust, aging, reaching, dying, returned to stillness. "It’s me! the smile proclaims." Shot through with the "animism of particulars," with eidola, or bodies returned enlivened, as in memory, as in dreams of the beloved deceased, each sentence vibrates with its own internal melody, both a stunning and unforgettable composition in grief and a riveting song in praise of life, each line a sequence of "multicolored blown-glass beads of sound along a thread." Boyer Rickel has written a powerful and personal masterpiece.