The Final Voicemails
Poems
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- USD 10.99
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
“Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, / what with all the present tense left to go.” From Max Ritvo—selected and edited by Louise Glück—comes a final collection of poems fully inscribed with the daring of his acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit.
Diagnosed with terminal cancer at sixteen, Ritvo spent the next decade of his life pursuing poetry with frenetic energy, culminating in the publication of Four Reincarnations. As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.
The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, “the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what.” It is an antagonist—and it is a part of the self. Ritvo’s poems ring with considered reflection about the enduring final question, while suggesting—in their vibrancy and their humor—that death is not merely an end.
The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful—and completely breathtaking—second collection.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive," writes Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Gl ck in her editor's note to this stunning and heartbreaking second posthumous collection from Ritvo (1990 2016). Gl ck has sifted through the work Ritvo left behind finished and unfinished alike to arrange a collection that displays the breathtaking talent and effortlessly surprising shifts that marked his first collection, Four Reincarnations, while also giving readers a glimpse into his creative process. Ritvo writes that "there is no pill to treat time," and readers can palpably grasp that sensation in many of these poems, which were written up until his death from cancer. And it is perhaps because these poems have not been through the usual revision cycles that they feel so pressing and otherworldly. An abbreviated version of "Mammals," Ritvo's marvelous undergraduate thesis, is also included. Here, he writes, "Overhead, the green angels mutter,/ oppressed by the thin cliffs of our souls,/ mostly oppressing themselves.// I fix everything by dying, and you not dying." These poems are raw and immediate, unflinching musings on the nature of the body, spirit, illness, and death: "When my heart stops, it will be the end of certain things,/ but not the end of things itself."