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    The Final Voicemails: Poems
    The Final Voicemails: Poems
    The Final Voicemails: Poems
    Ebook83 pages39 minutes

    The Final Voicemails: Poems

    By Max Ritvo

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    About this ebook

    “Even present tense has some of the grace of past tense, / what with all the present tense left to go.” From Max Ritvo—selected and edited by Louise Glück—comes a final collection of poems fully inscribed with the daring of his acrobatic mind and the force of his unrelenting spirit.

    Diagnosed with terminal cancer at sixteen, Ritvo spent the next decade of his life pursuing poetry with frenetic energy, culminating in the publication of Four Reincarnations. As with his debut, The Final Voicemails brushes up against the pain, fear, and isolation that accompany a long illness, but with all the creative force of an artist in full command of his craft and the teeming affection of a human utterly in love with the world.

    The representation of the end of life resists simplicity here. It is physical decay, but it is also tedium. It is alchemy, “the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where, / with what.” It is an antagonist—and it is a part of the self. Ritvo’s poems ring with considered reflection about the enduring final question, while suggesting—in their vibrancy and their humor—that death is not merely an end.

    The Final Voicemails is an ecstatic, hopeful, painful—and completely breathtaking—second collection.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9781571319906
    The Final Voicemails: Poems
    Author

    Max Ritvo

    Max Ritvo (1990–2016) was the author of Four Reincarnations and the chapbook Aeons, chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and the Boston Review, and as a Poem-a-Day for Poets.org. His prose and interviews have appeared in publications such as Lit Hub, Huffington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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      Book preview

      The Final Voicemails - Max Ritvo

      I.

      THE FINAL VOICEMAILS (2016)

      THE FINAL VOICEMAILS

      1

      I was told my proximity

      to the toxin would promote

      changes to my thinking, speech, and behavior.

      My first thought was, of course,

      for the child, the little girl,

      but graceful, silent figures

      in white suits flitted to her

      and led her away by the shoulders, like two friends

      taking a turtle from a pond.

      My second thought was about pain,

      the last thing visible

      without our manners—

      Or could there be an invisible peace

      once the peace of the senses departs?

      2

      I’m glad she’s gone, and not just for her sake:

      without her I feel somehow better equipped

      to be what I am becoming—

      which is, I suppose,

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