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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