Listening in Many Publics

"Jay Ritchie's poem's veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie's vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat.”—Ocean Vuong, author of Time is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“In a slippery embrace with the inconclusive amid worldly, cosmic, and affective totalities, the circuitous beauty of this work plays off the peculiar resonances of possible, closing-in futures, and gathers what it can into the eminent now. Somewhere in the reach for the unreachable, these poems grasp the impossibility of it all. And invite readers to join the poet in letting it go.”—D. M. Bradford, author of Dream of No One but Myself

“‘What really happens, what we live, the rest, everything else, where is it? How to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?’ In his famous text, The Infra-Ordinary, Georges Perec asks us to write in order to question the usual. And it is on a journey of this kind that Jay Ritchie’s poetry embarks to leave us in an open landscape where time loses its linearity and the everyday becomes a music at times harmonious, at times dissonant, but always with the ability to be an open question that pierces us.”—Cecilia Pavón, author of A Hotel With My Name

Praise for Jay Ritchie:

“With their clever—but never glib—concision of image, and emotional directedness, these poems actually make me feel something, and that is something I really enjoy.”—Rebecca Wolff, author of One Morning

“Charming, funny, and often elegant. This is a formidable collection.”—Ben Fama, author of Fantasy

“Ritchie throws black holes on the wall, disappears through them. His poems are like dreams dreamed mid-movement, just before something happens, as if light, buildings, breath, parakeets, hope, haircuts, Montreal, and art-making are all fragments of the same epiphany.”—Sean Michaels,Giller Prize–winnning author of Us Conductors