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Meanwhile features poems by John Wilson that paint a portrait of family life: the never-ending labor of building a house, the surprising details of raising children, the evolving relationship of a married couple.

Wilson is the author of three books of poetry, including Ink on Paper: Poems on Chinese & Japanese Paintings (City Lights). He edited Robert Creeley's Life and Work (University of Michigan Press) and The American Idiom (the William Carlos Williams-Harold Norse letters). His translations of Japanese literature have been published in anthologies and magazines and in a letter-press edition, The Head-Shaving Fox. For thirty years he taught East Asian and Western literature at the College of Creative Studies, UC Santa Barbara. 

About his work Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote:

  [Wilson] says: Art should give us back the world that our living confiscates. And this is a fitting characterization of what . . . this master poet [does], in our terrorist twenty-first century, in which we mourn for a more innocent, simpler, more serene world. In these beautiful pages, art triumphs over life.

Robert Creeley wrote:

[Wilson’s] reflective perceptions of the common world make a securing place for all to enter.

"My education in literature and writing that really mattered took place away from classrooms. It came directly from books and from conversations with Kenneth Rexroth, Basil Bunting, John Ridland, Max Schott, and Alan Stephens. Alan Stephens was most important because he and I hiked many times over a twenty-year span in the mountains behind Ojai, talking about what was being written and had been written, meanwhile trying to remain alert to life immediately around us."

This book was printed at the Kalamazoo Book Arts Center from hand-set Bembo type using a Vandercook Universal III press on Rives Heavyweight paper. The cover pages were made by hand from cotton and abaca fiber paper, produced at the KBAC. The engravings were created by Jeff Abshear. Seventy-five copies of this book were printed and casebound.