Tag Archives: book reviews

Jenna Le Reviews Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails

Posted on by

Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails (Milkweed Editions, 88 pp., published Sept. 2018) is actually two books: the first 41 pages are devoted to “The Final Voicemails,” a selection of 21 of Max Ritvo’s late poems, culled by Louise Gluck after his death at 25 from Ewing sarcoma, whereas the final 33 pages are given over to “Mammals,” a near-complete reproduction of Ritvo’s undergraduate thesis at Yale, where he studied poetry writing under Gluck. The poems in ‘The Final Voicemails” are far more powerful than those in “Mammals,” due to their emotional stakes being greater, although “Mammals” offers an interesting glimpse of alternate directions Ritvo’s trajectory might have taken if cancer had not first shadowed and at last curtailed his days.

Prior to picking up this volume, I had already read a great many of the poems that comprise “The Final Voicemails” proper, having scoured the websites of literary magazines for any trace of Ritvo I could find in the days immediately following his 2016 death. Being reunited with these poems, inhaling their familiarity, after all that time, felt like a real tangible gift, a quietly nourishing experience. Two years have passed since the world lost this poet, two years during which many things have happened and we remainers have lived and changed; at the end of that interval, for us to come back to these poems, or to have them rise forth to meet us in the form of a newly printed and bound book, can seem surreal, all the more so because the thoughts and images in the poems have the air of being as fresh and immediate as they did on the first encounter. As the readers, we are put in mind of Einstein’s train-cars, the thought experiment used to explain the theory of special relativity, and for a moment we cannot be sure whether we are on the train-car that was moving or the train-car that was stationary the whole time.

The passages I like best are pretty much the same ones I liked best two years ago. Of particular note, there are the stanzas about red berries at the end of the title poem, with all its deliciously unexpected turns (mimicking the turns of the tango the poem references two pages earlier): at first, the berries serve as a simile for the “mild passions” that distract or detract from self-knowledge, but out of nowhere they pivot to become the most real thing in the poem, the thing on which everything else hinges. Anticipating/preempting an imagined interjection from his reader (or interlocutor), the poet assumes an intimate directness, saying, “Don’t ask me to name [the berries] — / I’ve never been that kind of guy. / Red berries — sour, sticky. / If you really want to know, / come here, just try them.” The language is at once disarmingly casual (“guy”) and intoxicatingly soaked in romantic nostalgia (“I’ve never been” — three words that lay out upon the table the poet’s whole childhood, his entirety of past experiences, subtly contradicting the poem’s earlier assertion that self-knowledge had remained elusive: “All this time, I thought my shedding / would expose a core”). This passage about the berries exposes a kind of core, revealing the poet’s self-understanding that he is not “that kind of guy”: i.e., he does not see himself as the type of person who stands on ceremony with regard to the technical nomenclature for things; he prefers lived experiences, things that can be touched and tasted. The stanza’s last line (“come here, just taste them”) is simultaneously an alms-giving and a seduction, proffering fruit that, just seconds ago, were no more than one abstract arm of a simile but now, through verbal legerdemain, have flared to life.

That poem’s my very favorite, but there are plenty of nuggets of beautiful wisdom to be found here. Consider “Quiet Romance,” where the poet re-frames the encounter of man with death as a two-way street, the two parties equally afraid of one another: “I can hear already / a roaring in the distance, / half salt, half horse, // I like this, I’m scared, but / so’s the sound. We’ll both be guests.” From reciprocal fear, it’s only a short step to reciprocal esteem and hospitality: hearing Ritvo say it with his voice’s customary air of trustworthy authority, I am greatly tempted to believe it.

Or consider “Earthquake Country Before Final Chemotherapy,” where the poet, just by saying so, magically transforms himself into “the ghost in the bridge / willing the cars to join me, // telling them that death was not wind, / was not weight, // was not mist, / and certainly not the mountains — // that it was the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where / with what.” Death, in this portrayal, is a corruption of sentence structure, a flattening of grammar; does this mean poetry, with its three-dimensional — sometimes even four-dimensional — grammar, is the key to achieving anti-death? Reading these poems, I come close to being convinced it is.

I want to carry this book with me as a physical talisman for a while. I feel a wish to press it into the hands of all my fellow sarcoma doctors, if not all other readers. There are many layers here, ranging from the surface bodily descriptions of the cancer experience (the cachexia, the pain, the loss of appetite) to deeper layers of evocation, and if you don’t pick up on all the layers the first time, you can keep coming back for the others. This book will keep existing, and there is something we could all learn from keeping it close.

 

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st ed. pub. by Anchor & Plume, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, translations, and visual art appear in journals including AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.

“Some Days It Seems We’ve Found It”: Jacques J. Rancourt’s “In the Time of PrEP”

Posted on by

A Book Review                                                                                                                                                            by Reuben Gelley Newman

In 1993, the black gay HIV+ poet Melvin Dixon, in his speech “I’ll be Somewhere Listening for My Name,” charged future generations, “by the possibility of your good health, by the broadness of your vision, to remember us.” Jacques J. Rancourt’s chapbook In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018) not only takes up that charge, describing a present both startlingly different and unnervingly similar to Dixon’s past, but takes us to a somewhere where Dixon, perhaps, could be listening. In this somewhere, Rancourt can title a poem “I Don’t Go to Gay Bars Anymore,” then continue: “someone tells me & sure enough / another boards up.” In this somewhere,

The speaker both wants to live in that precarious Jerusalem — Rancourt’s San Francisco — and prays, simply, to live and to be seen. But this “holy city / swollen with light & sound…won’t last,” and its danger resounds through Rancourt’s tender, precariously balanced poems.

The chapbook begins with the expansive “Love in the Time of PrEP” — a title echoing Gabriel García Marquez’s famous book — in which the speaker and his husband are haunted by a rainbow, a “broken spectre,” while climbing a volcano. Everything is refracted — space, time, history — and the poem transitions seamlessly between intimacy and reflection, ending with “two Berkeley freshmen” who

This poem is on one level a plea for remembrance, but it also values those freshmen’s naivety. The chapbook’s epigraph, from the queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz, reads: “My approach to hope…can best be described as a backward glance that enacts a future vision.” Rancourt’s own “backward glance” links the boy’s foolishness with that of some gay men in the ’80s who contracted HIV. He sees, in the present, a world where those boys can act “as if none of this every happened”: a world both freer and scarier. And in the future, he envisions a world where, perhaps, remembrance of tragedy can foster greater appreciation of our relative freedom.

The chapbook’s cover, an untitled collage by the artist Barton Lidicé Beneš, depicts a little boy playing with HIV pills and birds — whose bodies are made of the pills — eating them. To me, this juxtaposition of pills and play evokes the freshmen’s naivety and recalls Dixon’s devastating quip: “As for me, I’ve become an acronym queen: BGM ISO same or other. HIV plus or minus. CMV, PCP, MAI, AZT, ddl, ddC. Your prescription gets mine.” Rancourt is not an “acronym queen” — though PrEP, as he notes, stands for “pre-exposure prophylaxis, a pill taken daily to reduce the chances of HIV infection” — but there is play in his danger, and danger in his play.

Indeed, the sheer joy of Rancourt’s language and imagery shines through despite the constant threat of death. “The jizz drifts like smoke” through the “holy Jacuzzi” in “At the Place of Bathhouses,” but “what has happened before / will happen again—the fog belt will roll in with the chill / of the dead…” The incantatory “Litany” takes its wordplay seriously: every line begins with the words “One man,” yet midway through the poem we read how “One man slept with ten men & survived / Ten men slept with one man & died.” Instead of confronting a homophobe, the speaker of “The Counter-Protester in the City” leaves his wedding cake topper on a bench nearby, while his younger self

In the Time of PrEP comes on the heels of a very different book addressing HIV/AIDS in the present, Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead. For Smith, the “us” is more specific: black, queer, and HIV+. But the book rings with a similar yearning for utopia: “please, don’t call / us dead, call us alive someplace better” (“summer, somewhere”). These books — along with many, many more by queer writers of all colors and genders — answer Dixon, who ends his speech with a plea to support gay and lesbian publishing, because, he insists, “our voice is our weapon.” Rancourt’s voice, with its wide-ranging depiction of grief, love, and history, is not only a weapon but a medicine. In “The Fall,” there’s a boy who, during sex,

Imagine Dixon’s name spoken back into the past, echoing throughout the well of history. Imagine his name spoken into the future, “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” where queer, HIV+ voices can thrive. I’ve only hinted at the importance of religion to Rancourt’s work, but perhaps we can think of his vision as, rather than mere “hope,” an act of faith. Though the litany of men Rancourt remembers remain chillingly nameless, he prays for them — and prays for a different future — despite their anonymity. In The Time of PrEP speaks queer identities to the past, present, and future. It searches for that somewhere we might never truly reach.

 

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newman is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.