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    Four Reincarnations: Poems
    Four Reincarnations: Poems
    Four Reincarnations: Poems
    Ebook86 pages41 minutes

    Four Reincarnations: Poems

    By Max Ritvo

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateSep 30, 2016
    ISBN9781571319579
    Four Reincarnations: Poems
    Author

    Max Ritvo

    Max Ritvo (1990–2016) was the author of Four Reincarnations and the chapbook Aeons, chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Boston Review, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. His prose and interviews have appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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      Four Reincarnations - Max Ritvo

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      PRAISE FOR MAX RITVO’S FOUR REINCARNATIONS

      "In Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo brings us along where poetry needs to go; away from the small confessional and into a big world of death, love, and metaphysics. While allowing for the possibility of a confessional mode in the details, Ritvo’s poems take stock of the nineteenth-century sublime, adding the contemporary death of God, and going forward with bravery, irony, and the most compassionate sense of humor. The relationship he hews between language and the body is both original and hard won. His lyric complicity is between self, dedicatee, reader, and world. Ritvo’s ear for language is beautiful, as is his spirit. His poems defy solipsism and enter a cosmology of unconditional love. How lucky I am that I found Max Ritvo and his poetry; he makes me love poetry again."

      —SARAH RUHL

      This is poetry written in the dark light of dying young. You feel the truth of this poetry too deeply to want to talk about it in your own words. You want to give it to other people still back here in health, to say to them, ‘Here: the earthly gift of this poet of genius, Max Ritvo.’ To Ritvo himself, we might say what he says to his wife in one of these poems: ‘Thou art me before I am myself.’ In the sense not of death, but of most ardent life.

      —JEAN VALENTINE

      "If you could confect a numinous cauldron and stir into it the lumens of Christopher Smart’s Spiritual Musick, the spirit-hounds of Hopkins’s ‘terrible crystals,’ the hysteria of Monty Python’s antics, the grace and depth of Keats’s early wisdoms, you would render incarnate the first and final book of Max Ritvo’s, Four Reincarnations. The poems flicker like fireflies let loose from their captivity in a mason jar, fulgurating like Nobodaddy’s business. Somehow, somewhere, Ritvo must have begun as an infant scholar, a prodigy, a young man of the rarest and most prescient gifts. This is a dazzling collection, rife with life, and with death, impending. This book, then, will be the afterlife. Ritvo’s work is extracelestial, riddled with brilliance and with ecstasies. We are lucky to have this luminous collection in our world. It will go on. And then on."

      —LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

      "Armed with intelligence, valor, audacity, and grace, Max Ritvo’s imagination pushes back against one grim reality after another in its insistence on celebrating being embodied in the first place. No poet I can think of undertakes the transmutation of suffering into art with anything resembling Ritvo’s wild theatricality, inclusiveness, and tonal range. Dizzying, out of proportion, poundingly felt, fantastical, fanatical, urgently constructed, confessional, gaudy, absurd, mystic, harrowing—the fact that Ritvo’s work can be described in so many ways is testament to its complexity. The fact that we can never quite describe it in full is evidence of its irreplaceability. The fact that it haunts

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