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 so many of its readers is proof that it has already become a necessary and sustaining part of us—some measure of our acquired wisdom, some portion of our vision of what it means to be alive.”
—TIMOTHY DONNELLY
© 2016, Text by Max Ritvo
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
Published 2016 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Cover illustration by Autumn Von Plinsky
Author photo by Ashley Woo
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First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ritvo, Max, 1990- author.
Title: Four reincarnations : poems / Max Ritvo.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis : Milkweed Editions, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030740 | ISBN 9781571314901 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781571319579 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3618.I8 A6 2016 | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030740
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. Four Reincarnations was printed on acid-free 100% postconsumer-waste paper by Edwards Brothers Malloy.
to my master, to my wife, to my mother,
to my fathers, to my sisters, to my nephew,
to my teachers, to my friends, to my exes,
to my shrinks, and to my doctors
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