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.
