The Final Voicemails: Poems

by Max Ritvo, Louise Glück (Editor)

Overview

“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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571315113
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/18/2018
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	1,041,757
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.60(h) x 0.20(d)

About the Author

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.

Read an Excerpt

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, preoccupied.

Nobody ever tells you how busy loneliness is—

Every night I cover the windows in soap,
and through the night I dart soap over any lick of light that makes its way to my desk or bed or the floor.

At first it was fear—an understanding that the light was death, was the toxin,
though really the toxin was invisible,
they said, and came from the water.

But work blesses fear like a holy man blessing a burlapped sinner,
saying It is for you and Because of you,

and in time the working mind knows only itself, which is loneliness.

3

Dim sight now,
and each twitch flows into a deep, old choreography.

Maybe a week ago, my arm banged the faucet,
and I danced in the middle of the bathroom—
the entire final dance from the tango class we took at the gym in New Haven,
with the air as you.

I wasn't picturing you,
I didn't smell your damp hair—
don't imagine that I'm living in memory.

Whatever I am, it is good at cutting meat.
The trick is: That's blood.
If you focus your fingers on feeling it,
you cannot mistake yourself for the animal,
who cannot feel; you never cut yourself if you give your life to the blood you shed.

4

I know you've been waiting for disintegration,
but it just doesn't seem to be coming.

I need to go out to gather some berries.
No more meat: I've adopted your diet.

All this time, I thought my shedding would expose a core,
I thought I would at least know myself,

but these mild passions, all surface, keep erupting now like acne—or like those berries on a bush.

Don't ask me to name them—
I've never been that kind of guy.
Red berries—sour, sticky.
If you really want to know,
come here, just try them.

Red as earth,
red as a dying berry,
red as your lips,
red as the last thing I saw and whatever next thing I will see.

***

EARTHQUAKE COUNTRY BEFORE FINAL CHEMOTHERAPY

For the first time tonight,
as I put my wife to bed
I didn't have to shove her off me.

She turned away in her sleep.

I wondered what was wrong with my chest.

I felt it, and the collar bone spiked up, and where she'd rest her cheek were ribs.

Who wants to cuddle a skeleton?

My skeleton wandered from the house and out onto the street.

He came, after much wandering, to the edge of a bay where a long bridge headed out—
the kind that hangs itself with steel

and sways as if the wind could take away its weight.

There were mountains in the distance—
triangles of cardboard—
or perhaps the mist was tricking his eyes.

The instant the mist made him doubtful,
it turned to rain.

The rain covered everything. The holes in his face were so heavy he wondered if the water was thickening—
if he was leaching into them.

He panicked. Perhaps he was gunked up with that disgusting paste,
flesh, all over again.

If I were alive I'd have told him
I was nothing like what he was feeling—

that the rain felt more like the shell of a crab than the way I'd held him.

That it felt more like him.

But I wasn't alive—
I was 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.

When my skeleton looked down he was corrupted

in the femur by fracture,
something swelling within.

Out of him leaked pink moss.
Water took it away.

***
TUESDAY

We haven't moved from this pier in a couple years.
All we need to do to be happy is point out fish.

Sure, we're just pointing at ripples,
but we know they're fish

because a long time ago we ate an oyster,
and every time a fish sees another,

you and me get fed again. Elizabeth,
when you put your hands to the scales

the senses lose weight and a new full that doesn't hurt me

can last in my stomach. The bulk of the meat you thin into a braid of arrows,
and the gills, the difficult scissors taken inside to breathe, they're just wide arrows.
A kind that points—
like a hand tremoring because there's a past being pointed to that already understood the present.
***

LEISURE-LOVING MAN SUFFERS UNTIMELY DEATH

You ask why the dinner table has been so quiet.
I've felt, for a month, like the table:

holding strange things in my head when there are voices present.

And when the voices die,
a cool cloth and some sparkling spray.

I'm on painkillers around the clock,
and I fear it's always been

just the pain talking to you.

The last vision was of the pain leaving—
it looked just like me as it came out

of my mouth, but it was holding a spatula.
It was me if I had learned to cook.

The pain drifted to the kitchen.
He hitched himself to the oven, was a centaur

completed by bread, great black loaves bursting from the oven,

and then the vision vanished.
I followed, and stood where he had stood.

The knives rustled in the block,
the pans clacked overhead.

I'm sterile from chemo,
and thought of that.

Sure, I wish my imagination well,
wherever it is. But now

I have sleep to fill. Every night
I dream I have a bucket

and move clear water from a hole to a clear ocean. A robot's voice barks

This is sleep. This is sleep.
I'd drink the water, but I'm worried the next

night I'd regret it.
I might need every last drop. Nobody will tell me.

Table of Contents

Contents

Editor's Note

I. The Final Voicemails

The Final Voicemails
The Soundscape of Life Is Charred by Tiny Bonfires
Delphi
Quiet Romance
Earthquake Country before Final Chemotherapy
My Bathtub Pal
Amuse-Bouche
My New Friend
Uncle Needle
Dinner in Los Angeles, Raining in July
Anatomic and Hydraulic Chastity
Your Next Date Alone
Nobody Asked Anything
Down with the Landlord
December 29
Tuesday
Name My Time of Death and See What I Do to You
Cachexia
Boy Goes to War
Centaur Music
Leisure-Loving Man Suffers Untimely Death

II. Mammals

Lajuwa Forgets How to Love
Troy
Bustan
Mom Myth
Broad Spectrum Romance Novel
Sheol
Too Much Breath
Atlas
Big Haul
C
Us and the Good Guest
The Oedipalean Sabbath
Postcards from Mount Blanc
Let's Talk about Banalities
Building the Tank
To C
January 8
Listening, Speaking, and Breathing
Sky-Sex Dreams of Randal
Happiest Moments (Autocaliban)
Last List
Tages

Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Final Voicemails

“Astonishing . . . These poems envision countless afterlives, each one more arresting than the last. . . . Ritvo’s legacy, like Emily Dickinson’s, will resemble not a solemn monument but a vibrant workshop, left open for readers to explore.”—New Yorker

“[The Final Voicemails] reflects Ritvo's astonishing linguistic agility, singular vision, and thought processes as well as his frankness, quirkiness, and sly humor. . . . It will stand as a testament to the salvation that is poetry, and how it lives beyond the page and the poet.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Stunning and heartbreaking . . . pressing and otherworldly . . . A collection that displays the breathtaking talent and effortlessly surprising shifts that marked [Ritvo’s] first collection, Four Reincarnations. . . . These poems are raw and immediate, unflinching musings on the nature of the body, spirit, illness, and death.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“In The Final Voicemails [Ritvo’s] words engage with doubt and certainty in a manner that goes well beyond mere knowledge. They convey the sort of wild and strange imagery that so many contemporary poets strive to achieve. . . . These poems offer a surreal, in- and out-of-body candor that, at times, can be devastating to read. . . . [Ritvo] left us a legacy of wisdom in poetic reflections few have surpassed.”—The Rumpus

“An aesthetic and moral achievement. . . . Very few disciples of Ashbery have come so close to equaling the master’s ability to coax a sense of mythic import out of personal life.”—World Literature Today

“Ritvo gives us poetry, so affirming, so beautiful, and so mortal.”—Columbia Journal

“In his second collection of poems, The Final Voicemails, the late Max Ritvo pulls back the curtains of the rooms that occupy his body and mind. . . . in these pages he still welcomes us into his home furnished with pain, loneliness, and joy all abound with his signature wry humor and transcendent hope.”—The Arkansas International

“The Final Voicemails is pressing, pressurized, and prescient beyond both its years and its words. These poems retell a life filled with pains and joys that are so intense they should almost be wordless, were they not performed here with Max Ritvo’s immeasurable talent for articulating the piercing moments of life that so clearly demonstrate transcendence. Ritvo was a genius. He understood what poetry was meant to do in all its greatest moments and then pushed it to go just a little bit farther. Hundreds of years from now, we will still be talking about this book’s unbearable truths, and its unbearable feats.”—Dorothea Lasky

“Since Max Ritvo’s passing, I’ve heard critics compare him to Wallace Stevens, Rainer Maria Rilke, John Keats, and countless others. Of course, Max wasn’t any of them exactly, but it’s astonishing that one inscrutable young poet could evoke comparison with such titans while still remaining so enchantingly himself. In The Final Voicemails, we see Ritvo at his most imaginative—clouds are worn as wigs, meat is cut into a braid of arrows, a carpenter nails brains to the side of a lung. The effect is wild, incantatory. You’ll find yourself beaming with your whole heart, even as Ritvo breaks it again and again.”—Kaveh Akbar

Praise for Four Reincarnations

“Good-humored, appealingly sly, and surprisingly whimsical.”—New York Times Book Review

“This is an extraordinary body of work, the poems marked by intellectual bravado and verbal extravagance; Max Ritvo’s dazzling suppleness of mind manifests itself in electric transitions and unexpected juxtapositions, in wide-ranging reference and baroque allusion. But what makes this book unforgettable is the core of intense emotion at the heart every poem.

“Max has been dealt a bleak but fertile subject: the result is not, as one might expect of an artist so young, a poetry of harsh autobiographical intimacy. What happens in these pages is an expansion, not a contraction; its result is an increased freedom and boldness and daring. The poems are alive with imperatives (as they must be when time is short), but urgency is everywhere conjoined with invention. When the poems do touch, directly and dramatically, on mortality, they are simultaneously candid and radically direct or brief, as in ‘Second Dream’: everything on the page is essential.

“Four Reincarnations is one of the most original and ambitious first books in my experience. Max Ritvo sounds like no one else—this is the rarest of all possible gifts and means that, at their best, these poems do things in the language that haven’t been done.”—Louise Glück

“A Max Ritvo poem is:
A map drawn by hand to show where the body is buried.
A card trick with words . . . ‘Don’t show me how you did it.’
Like reading the last sentence in a book first.
Dragging words across the page like a bow across a string.
A piece of candy covered with ants.
Like silverfish ate the words off a page . . . and left you a riddle.
All of the above.”—Tom Waits

“In Four Reincarnations, Max Ritvo brings us along where poetry needs to go; away from the small confessional and into a big world of death, love, and metaphysics. While allowing for the possibility of a confessional mode in the details, Ritvo’s poems take stock of the nineteenth-century sublime, adding the contemporary death of God, and going forward with bravery, irony, and the most compassionate sense of humor. The relationship he hews between language and the body is both original and hard won. His lyric complicity is between self, dedicatee, reader, and world. Ritvo’s ear for language is beautiful, as is his spirit. His poems defy solipsism and enter a cosmology of unconditional love. How lucky I am that I found Max Ritvo and his poetry; he makes me love poetry again.”—Sarah Ruhl

“This is poetry written in the dark light of dying young. You feel the truth of this poetry too deeply to want to talk about it in your own words. You want to give it to other people still back here in health, to say to them, ‘Here: the earthly gift of this poet of genius, Max Ritvo.’ To Max himself, we might say what he says to his wife in one of these poems: ‘Thou art me before I am myself.’ In the sense, not of death, but of most ardent life.”—Jean Valentine

“If you could confect a numinous cauldron and stir into it the lumens of Christopher Smart's Spiritual Musick, the spirit-hounds of Hopkins' ‘terrible crystals,' the hysteria of Monty Python’s antics, the grace and depth of Keats’s early wisdoms, you would render incarnate the first and final book of Max Ritvo’s Four Reincarnations. The poems flicker like fireflies let loose from their captivity in a mason jar, fulgurating like Nobodaddy’s business. Somehow, somewhere, Ritvo must have begun as an infant scholar, a prodigy, a young man of the rarest and most prescient gifts. This is a dazzling collection, rife with life, and with death, impending. This book, then, will be the afterlife. Ritvo’s work is extracelestial, riddled with brilliance and with ecstasies. We are lucky to have this luminous collection in our world. It will go on. And then on.”—Lucie Brock-Broido

“Armed with intelligence, valor, audacity, and grace, Max Ritvo’s imagination pushes back against one grim reality after another in its insistence on celebrating being embodied in the first place. No poet I can think of undertakes the transmutation of suffering into art with anything resembling Ritvo’s wild theatricality, inclusiveness, and tonal range. Dizzying, out of proportion, poundingly felt, fantastical, fanatical, urgently constructed, confessional, gaudy, absurd, mystic, harrowing—the fact that Ritvo’s work can be described in so many ways is testament to its complexity. The fact that we can never quite describe it in full is evidence of its irreplaceability. The fact that it haunts so many of its readers is proof that it has already become a necessary and sustaining part of us—some measure of our acquired wisdom, some portion of our vision of what it means to be alive.”—Timothy Donnelly

“Silly, sweet, and sad all at once. Ritvo was able to revel in the absurdity―and poignancy―of his condition.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“Vital and unflinching poems that emerge from the unflagging energy of a mind embedded within, yet constantly struggling beyond, the suffering of his body. Ritvo’s poems sizzle over the all-to-brief fire of his hungry and staggering imagination.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“By turns carnal and cerebral, prophetic and pragmatic, crude and contemplative, Ritvo’s voice is a wildly imaginative and frenetic force.”—Booklist (starred review)

“Seen as a leading poet of his generation, Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer in his teens and died in August at age 25. In breathtaking language, he chronicles not what it’s like to be dying but what it’s like to be living.”—Library Journal (starred review)

“Ritvo has left behind a rich collection of poetry that emboldens us to bravely inhabit our bodies and to look toward the future.”—Guernica

“There is no doubt in my mind that Max Ritvo’s first and only poetry collection is among my favorite books that I have ever read, to say nothing ”—Adroit Journal

“Compelling, relatable, and heartbreaking . . . there is deliberate, conscious artistry [in Four Reincarnations].”―Kenyon Review

“Max Ritvo’s debut poetry collection, which unflinchingly addresses his cancer diagnosis, ranges from the sublime to the profane. It is alternatively heartbreaking and joyful, visceral and sensual, funny and wise.”—Literary Hub

From the Publisher

★ 09/15/2018
Diagnosed with cancer in his teens, Ritvo died in 2016 at age 25, near the release date of his remarkable debut collection, Four Reincarnations. This second collection, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Glück, again offers his distinctive voice—partly insouciant, partly penetratingly smart—imparting an immediate sense of what it's like to die as he effectively reminds us what it's like to live. "Nobody ever tells you how busy loneliness is," he observes, adding, "I'm just exasperated. Everywhere life-sounds/ swarm this, our shared pond." But if Ritvo makes us acutely aware of what we skim through daily, he refuses to play guru: "My baldness is not wisdom," he insists, and quickly reminds us that each day he's learning, too: "I thought I would at least know myself." Ritvo is generous to take us along on his final journey, and along the way, as he shows us a bare tree, a blue-eyed crow, the joy of moving, how stars sometimes don't join in constellations on a dark, wet night, he's making us see, really see. VERDICT Highly recommended.

Library Journal

★ 08/20/2018
“Poets who die at twenty-five do not commonly leave bodies of work so urgent, so daring, so supple, so desperately alive,” writes Pulitzer Prize–winner Louise Glück in her editor’s note to this stunning and heartbreaking second posthumous collection from Ritvo (1990–2016). Glück has sifted through the work Ritvo left behind—finished and unfinished alike—to arrange a collection that displays the breathtaking talent and effortlessly surprising shifts that marked his first collection, Four Reincarnations, while also giving readers a glimpse into his creative process. Ritvo writes that “there is no pill to treat time,” and readers can palpably grasp that sensation in many of these poems, which were written up until his death from cancer. And it is perhaps because these poems have not been through the usual revision cycles that they feel so pressing and otherworldly. An abbreviated version of “Mammals,” Ritvo’s marvelous undergraduate thesis, is also included. Here, he writes, “Overhead, the green angels mutter,/ oppressed by the thin cliffs of our souls,/ mostly oppressing themselves.// I fix everything by dying, and you not dying.” These poems are raw and immediate, unflinching musings on the nature of the body, spirit, illness, and death: “When my heart stops, it will be the end of certain things,/ but not the end of things itself.” (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly