Autumn Von Plinsky, thank you for the phenomenal cover art—our art will always be together now! Fathomless thanks to Mary Austin Speaker, my designer, for her sensitive scouring of every bone in this book and every blemish on its skin. And my extended family who has taken care of me over the years: my “Uncle Needle” Shai Golan and his mishpacha, Rayon Black, Marco Campobosso, Braylan Ritvo, David Jackson-Hanen, Kathryn Jackson, Allen and Anya Hanen, Michele and David Slifka, Chris and Chelsea Dato, Marissa Nestor, William Zabel, Maria Medrano, Sandra Espinola, Flor Medrano, Don and Shana Passman and the Passman Clan, the Schulman Clan, Mark and Debbie Attanasio, Judy and Morris Sarna, Betsy and Alan Cohn, Shira and Jimmy Levin, Gary and Phyllis Gladstein, Andres Martin and the whole Martin Clan, Demetra Hufnagel, Norm and Mary Pattiz, Sam and Marion Waxman, Mark and Harriet Borovitz, Elimelech Goldberg and the Kids Kicking Cancer family, Laila Maher, and the singular, brilliant Penelope Laurans.

* * *

Boston Review: “Afternoon,” “Black Bulls,” “Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together,” “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid” (published as “Poem About You Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid”), “Radiation in New Jersey, Convalescence in New York,” “The Senses”

Chronogram: “Second Dream” (published as “Tages”)

Iowa Review: “Poem Set in the Day and in the Night”

The Journal: “The Blimp”

Lit Hub: “The End”

Los Angeles Review of Books: “Poem to My Dog, Monday, on Night I Accidentally Ate Meat”

The New Yorker: “Poem to My Litter”

Plume: “Mommy Harangues Poor Randal,” “To Randal, Crow-Stealer, Lord of the Greenhouse,” “The Curve”

POETRY: “Dawn of Man,” “The Big Loser”

Poets.org Poem-a-Day: “Touching the Floor”

Poets/Artists: “The Watercolor Eulogy” (published as “To the Hands of My Painter”)

Slate: “The Hanging Gardens,” “Universe Where We Weren’t Artists”

St. Ann’s Review: “Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal”

The Yale Review: “Living It Up”

from AEONS, 2014 Poetry Society of America Chapbook awarded by Jean Valentine: “Appeal to My First Love” (published as “Where I Laughed”), “Hi, Melissa” (published as “Still”), “The Senses,” “Universe Where We Weren’t Artists,” “Lyric Complicity for One” (published as “Lyric Complicity”)

About the Author

Credit: Ashley Woo

MAX RITVO is the author of the chapbook AEONS, chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and Boston Review, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. Ritvo’s prose and interviews have appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in New York.

Interior design & typesetting by Mary Austin Speaker

Typeset in Fournier

Fournier is a typeface created by the Monotype Corporation in 1924, based on types cut in the mid-eighteenth century by Pierre-Simon Fournier, a French typographer. The specific cuts used as a reference for Fournier are referred to as “St Augustin Ordinaire” in Fournier’s influential Manuel Typographique, published in 1764 in Paris.