At the age of twenty-nine, just five years after they met, John
Rybicki's wife, the poet Julie Moulds, was diagnosed with cancer. Here,
in poems raw and graceful, authentic and wise, Rybicki pays homage to
the brave love they shared during her sixteen-year battle and praises
the caregivers--nurses and doctors and friends--who helped them
throughout. He invites the reader to bear witness to not only the
chemotherapy, the many remissions, and the bone marrow transplants, but
also the adoption of the couple's son, the lifted prayers, borrowed
time, and lovers' last touches. A husband smashes an ice-cream cone
against his forehead to make his wife laugh. He awakes in the middle of
the night to find their dog drowsing atop a pile of her remnant clothes.
The lamentations and celebrations of When All the World Is Old create
a living testament to an endless love. Braided with intimate entries
from Moulds's journal, these poems become the unflinching and lyric
autobiography of a man hurtling himself headlong into the fire and
emerging, somehow, to offer us a portrait of light and grace.
Rybicki's hymns rest in the knowledge that even though all of our love
stories one day come to an end, we must honor the loving anyway. The
poet has dipped his pen in despair, but as he cleaves his heart and our
own, he transmits the exquisite pain of loss into a beauty so fierce and
scalding and ultimately healing that the reader comes out whole on the
other side.
