Four Reincarnations
Poems
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
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. The poems of Four Reincarnations 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Slippery and terrifyingly urgent, funny yet despairingly so, Ritvo (1990 2016) hits all the right notes in an accomplished, surprising, and bizarrely erotic debut made more poignant by his death weeks before publication. Diagnosed with terminal cancer at 22, Ritvo produced vital and unflinching poems that emerge from the unflagging energy of a mind embedded within, yet constantly struggling beyond, the suffering of his body. His mind, he says, is "like a black glove/ you mistake for a man/ in the middle of a blizzard." Alarming imagery, paired with supple and electric turns of logic and sound, define the collection: "I'm told to set myself goals. But my mind/ doesn't work that way. I, instead, have wishes// for myself. Wishes aren't afraid/ to take on their own color and life / like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet/ puffs out his cheeks and strips them bloody." In his poem "The End," Ritvo muses whether "death just meant spending/ all your time with your past.// The more there is, the more loss there is / true not only of the world, but of perceiving it,/ even the imagination sizzling on top of it." Ritvo's poems sizzle over the all-too-brief fire of his hungry and staggering imagination.
