Flint Memorial Library (North Reading)

Four reincarnations, poems, Max Ritvo

eng

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poetry

Four reincarnations

953525418

Max Ritvo

poems

Reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising, Four Reincarnations is a debut collection of poems that introduces an exciting new voice in American letters. When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. These poems are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to "everything living / that won't come with me / into this sunny afternoon." Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love - a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures. Ritvo writes to his wife, ex -lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poems, from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death, it's Ritvo's vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets

1. Living it up; The curve; The senses; Holding a freshwater fish in a pail above the sea; The watercolor eulogy; HI, Melissa; Poem to my litter; Dawn of man; Black bulls -- 2. For crow; To Randal, crow-stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse; Sky-sex dreams of Randal; Stalking my ex-girlfriend in a pasture; Mommy harangues poor Randal; Lyric complicity for one -- 3. Poem about my wife being perfect and me being afraid; When I criticize you, I'm just trying to criticize the universe; Poem in which my shrink is a little boy; Radiation in New Jersey, convalescence in New York; Poem set in the day and in the night; Poem to my dog, Monday, on night I accidentally ate meat; Troy; Heaven is us being a flower together; Afternoon -- 4. Second dream; Plush bunny; Crow says goodbye; Appeal to my first love; The big loser; The vacuum planet of the pee pee priestess; The blimp; The end; Touching the floor; Zyprexa, the snow pills; Snow angels; The hanging gardens; Universe where we weren't artists

4 reincarnations