Four Reincarnations: Poems

by Max Ritvo

Published shortly after his death in August 2016 at age 25, Max Ritvo's collection of poetry is reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising. When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body.

The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to “everything living / that won’t come with me / into this sunny afternoon.” Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of love—a cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures. Ritvo writes to his wife, ex­-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats.

In these poems—from the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of death—it’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets.

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary, Death, Nonfiction, The United States Of America

79 pages, Hardcover

First published October 4, 2016

About the author

Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. Ritvo's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among many other publications.

Reviews

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just like neurons fire into a mind,
part habit, part chaos,
so too the world's voices fire into a God.

Our chats are as important to God
as your thalamus is to you.
He can't risk us not
analyzing one another forever--
he might have a seizure.

-Max Ritvo, from "Poem in Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy"


Four Reincarnations is a highly philosophical book, largely concerned with metaphysical questions like: why does language exist? is there a God, and, if so, what does this higher power want for us? what is the nature of thought? what is the nature of the mind? in the struggle between the body and the mind, the senses and the intellect, can either be trusted not to lead us astray?

The last of these questions is made more urgent by the fact that the speaker's body is deteriorating, succumbing to a prolonged and disorienting death from cancer, at the same time his mind is making these poems.

At times, I felt like I was reading a Buddhist metaphysical text like The Milindapanha, except even weirder and more topsy-turvy.

At other times, I felt like I was reading the Egyptian Book of the Dead, preparing me, step-wise, for my own eventual confrontation with nothingness (as all great poetry should?):

....My future has eyes,
for a while. Then my future has stitches,
like 'pecial's. Then cool cotton, like her guts.
Of course there is another world. But it is not elsewhere.
The eye traps it so where heaven should be
you see shadows. You start to reek.
That's you moving on.

(from "Plush Bunny")

At other times, I felt like I was reading a madcap rewrite of Freud. In the poem "Black Bulls," Ritvo distills the Freudian concepts of Id, Ego, and Superego into image with a purity reminiscent of Lorca: "My mind is / three black bulls on / three hills of sand, far apart." This is followed by a vigorous, delightfully vulgar series of dramatic monologues and dialogues where Ritvo explores this theme in greater depth, personifying the warring components of his mind as quasi-cartoonish/quasi-mythological characters with names like Crow, Randal, Sky-Sex, and Mommy (what would Freud make of that last one in particular, I wonder!).

Ritvo is a versatile poet -- I was surprised to find amid the free verse a poem consisting of (mostly) rhymed quatrains of (mostly) four-syllable lines that is quite beautiful in its portrayal of yearning for a loved one who is dead:

my fish. Where have
you gone? I was
hoping to wake
from this dream

with you drawing
the curtains, a gold
glow on the sheet
wrapping me up.

(from "Holding a Freshwater Fish in a Pail Above the Sea")

Earlier versions of many of these poems appeared in Ritvo's chapbook Aeons , and it's interesting to compare the earlier versions to the later and try to understand why Ritvo made the revisions he did. "The Watercolor Eulogy," which appeared in Aeons under the title "The Hands of My Painter," has been pared down, made starker, alterations that I think make this already great poem even better. "The Watercolor Eulogy" and other poems of its nakedly emotional ilk ("Heaven Is Us Being a Flower Together," "Afternoon") add a necessary leavening to this book, balancing out Ritvo's philosophical abstractions and zany humor with an element of genuine emotional gravitas. It's this heart-element that makes me read poetry in the first place, so I'm glad to find it here.

[Jerrod · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange, riotous, impossibly large masterpiece that dwells in the dark, funny, sprawling mess of paradox that is Life. Ritvo composed this book as his body was being taken by cancer and its existence--and excellence--is nothing short of miraculous. It puts me in mind of the Borges story "The Secret Miracle", which relates the story of a Jewish playwright sentenced to death by firing squad in Nazi Germany. The playwright, after reckoning with his impending demise, pleads with God for but one thing: the time to finish his final play, his masterwork. His wish is granted and as he is set before the squad Time grounds to a halt. He completes his play in mind and then a moment later is shot. He is dead, the lights gone out. Four Reincarnations evokes this story not only in the compressed time frame and urgency with which it was written, which is evident in the lyric power and sublime humor inscribed on every page, but also in providing an answer to what is left unsaid in Borges's tale: what do you say, and how, when death is so near and apparent? Ritvo answers with gratitude and recontextualization. There is little bitterness, only eyes opened and wet anew. Death is the occasion of intense collapsing of space and time. It is also the occasion for rich, quixotic humor that rings from the specific the universal truth and resonance of shared feeling and the weird pleasures of the body. A collection that sticks to the ribs and a unique, ever rewarding gift.

P.S. (And what an Acknowledgment! It puts into real perspective the singularity of this enterprise and the contingency and interconnection of every life)

[Ioan · Rating 4 out of 5]

" I'm told to set myself goals. But my mind
doesn't work that way. I, instead, have wishes

for myself. Wishes aren't afraid
to take on their own color and life---"

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few poems I really liked, and I appreciate Ritvo's humor and experimental spirit, but... most of these poems just didn't work for me. They were far too abstract, and I didn't feel like I was in on the joke, so to speak. It was just hard to understand the focus of this collection. That being said, Ritvo had a wonderful flair for language, and his death is definitely a loss to the literary world.

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ritvo's poetry is tragic in light of his death before this book was widely released: his experience of the his bodily disintegration and his struggling with theodicy and philosophy render this book especially haunting. When he writes "When I was about to die / my body lit up / like when I leave my house / without my wallet" the pathos and humor intermix. Vulnerable, intimate, and powerful.

[Jerrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I didn't like every poem in this collection, many of them were great. I am amazed that a young man dying of cancer could write without a lot of anger or cynicism and craft some beautiful poetry. The poems have a good sense of urgency, which you would expect in this case. He also seems to be able to recognize the beauty along with the ugliness in his life and has great acceptance of his impending death. I'm glad I picked this one up.

[Sheri Fresonke Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four Reincarnations features poems that delve into the quality and meaning of life and live. Most are both sensual and thoughtful, examining a way of life that is sparse but loving. The end of the book features an essay from Max Ritvo, thanking the many people he's loved and how they influenced his art. They have an etched airiness that captures moments, dreams and emotion edited down to the meat.

[Stacey · Rating 4 out of 5]

from Afternoon

When I was about to die
My body lit up
Like when I leave my house
Without my wallet

What am I missing, I ask,
Patting my chest
Pocket.

And I am missing everything living
That won't come with me
Into this sunny afternoon

[Ot · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in 40 minutes. Which is probably a bad thing but I kept wanting to find out if and how he had topped the poem I had just read. Second section was kinda dirty but the first hit me like a ton of bricks. So much space and also brutal honesty in these poems.

[F(r)iction F(r)iction]

Read Samuel Dymerski's book review of Four Reincarnations: Poems: https://tetheredbyletters.com/book-re...

[Travis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this as a cancer narrative and sickbed collection was devastating.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four Reincarnations was published this year as Ritvo was dying from a rare disease that plagued him most of his short life. In the end he died just prior to its publication, with poems from this collection, his first, having appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review and Poetry. His student work, his academic studies, and appearances in magazines had built up a quiet fame—the kind of fame that is almost exclusive to the world of poetry but gets you the attention of people as diverse as Louise Gluck and Tom Waits, among others.

Ritvo’s poetry deserves the attention, apart from the tragedy, though his willingness to look straight at his circumstances; his courage in pursuing his vocation under those circumstances is compelling. But what gets one finally is the achievement, the craft and discipline and daring. Most of us have the luxury of presuming we are immortal for some few decades. Yet Ritvo didn’t play it safe and just try to urgently capture in a kind of verse journal his world so coupled with illness and death. The poetry is technically challenging and imaginatively complex. There are moments and poems where everything is perfectly clear and others where it is as challenging to understand what is happening as it must have been to be experiencing it and wondering Job-like why.

“Skinny, hairy-chested,
made of pellets of rice,
cheeping in a way that’s
endearing and inappropriate,
confused, surprised at the confusion,
surprised at the surprise,
and so on, very tiringly, so on.”

An artist friend of his gets a remarkable pair of elegies. One includes these lines:

“No one can speak the language you will rewrite.
I know this isn’t the heaven we wanted.
What ever is?

And soon I’ll join you
amid the terms
for tiny bottles of defunct potions
and no longer understood passions
and together we’ll bury
our own particular I love you.”

There is no getting around the tragedy, just as there is no getting around the life he made of his work. One of my favorites was the brief poem “Snow Angels”. It reads:

“We call it snow
when the parts of God,

too small to bear, contest our bodies
for the possession of our smallest sensations.

The snow brings suffering to the only thing small enough
to have lived peaceably next to suffering.”

The combination of rigor and grace make Four Reincarnations a beautiful gift from a beautifully gifted and courageously generous poet.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only hokey bits of this, Max Ritvo's first and only book, are in the back matter. First there is the absurd blurb on the back cover by Tom Waits — in verse, as if the fellow stays up at night thinking up new ways to be pretentious. Then there's the six-page acknowledgement section, which would be an embarrassment to any writer who didn't know he was dying and wanted to say everything he had to say in what little time he had. The section includes a shout-out to Waits and Nina Simone ("My time spent with you, Tom and Nina, has given me faith that a human voice can reach right into another's heart"), which gives the whole thing an unfortunate make-a-wish-foundation veneer.

None of this lessens my admiration for Ritvo, whose bravery and stoicism in the face of certain death must set an example for the rest of us, or for his poetry. Before his death last year at the Keatsian age of 25, he produced 70 pages of extraordinary work. He had a virtuosic command of image, idea, and metaphor, and the tone of the poems is by turns funny, stoic, and even sometimes numinous. But the poems are also entirely free of the sentimentality betrayed in the acknowledgements (which, given the poet's circumstances, one easily forgives). I can't think of the last book of contemporary verse I have read that brought me to the verge of tears, as this one did several times.

I shall have to read all the poems again. But here are the last sixteen lines of "The Hanging Gardens," the penultimate poem in the book, which I think give a good sense of Ritvo's often thrilling swoops of thought and association:

The new day is slid underneath
the old days:
The clouds can hear only themselves,
the wind can hear only itself,
the old sky grows dark and idiotic, and becomes heaven,
the sun wrenches itself open:

Babylon before Eden,
orchard before garden,
our variety before variety,
shame before shame-knowledge:
When shame was an entity
wandering even from the body
into the tea,
into the brass doves,
into this autobiographical moment.

I must take full responsibility. Quite right. I will move on.

I hope and believe that at least several poems in this book will survive into future time.

[Avery Guess · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Max Ritvo’s collection Four Reincarnations are filled with language that flickers brightly against what might otherwise be a dark subject—the cancer that ended up taking the poet. I was most entranced with Ritvo’s use of surprising similes, which had me in mind more than once of Larry Levis. In “The Senses,” “The sound of burning vegetables / is like a quiet, clean man folding sheets” and “my mind / like a black glove / you mistake for a man / in the middle of a blizzard.” And in “Dawn of Man,” Ritvo writes: “Wishes aren’t afraid / to take on their own color and life— // like a boy who takes a razor from a high cabinet, / puffs out his cheeks, and strips them bloody.” It makes sense, this reaching for a way to describe what is ultimately untranslatable (one’s experience of their own body) to an outsider. How else can we understand other than through indirect, imperfect comparison. There’s the ecstatic in Ritvo’s poems as well. In “For Crow,” “the you-around-you is the harbor” and the moment comes when “How I feel is then forgotten, / and instead I find myself / moving, joy, moving!” And there’s also peace, as in “Lyric Complicity for One”’s final lines: “For every thought, a new fish soars / right under the anchored boat— / a lullaby to quiet another lullaby.” I enjoyed this collection, and I wish there was more Max Ritvo work to come. Instead, I’ll just have to settle for returning to this book—an easy task.

[Abeer Abdullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Max Ritvo passed away last year after a long battle with cancer, only in his mid twenties. A painful constant attempt to derive meaning, beauty and love out of this ongoing ungraspable chaos that is human existence. It is a painful anatomy of what it means to be dying and to come to terms and give thanks. I am currently also reading James Baldwin's essays in which he describes the artist as one trying to create order and meaning out of the chaos haplessness of life. At one point in Max's poems he wonders where death could take him if all of it exists right here on earth, and it reminds me of how I felt when I was in highschool and first studied about the law of conservation of energy in physics class. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only constantly reborn.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

Max Ritvo's moving collection of poems documents his life and experiences with cancer. The poems are at times abstract and confusing but it certainly felt real and true to his experiences. Ritvo is raw and honest. I left the collection moved and deeply saddened that Ritvo's bright voice won't be able to further contribute to the literary world.

[Camila Uriona · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an awesome book. Max Ritvo's poetry about his (lost) battle with cancer is deep, tinted with inevitable pain. It's not a poetry of pity or sadness, though. It's a poetry written with love, gratitude and a sensibility out of this world.

[John Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous book. Humorous, sharp, and darkly magical. And titles as organic and odd as James Wright. Read, also, the acknowledgements.

[Amanda Moore]

Urgent, raw, gorgeous--a first and a last book and a huge beating, thinking, suffering, loving heart. Worth it.

[Brandon Amico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whoa.

[Ian Mathers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funnily ("funnily") enough, Anaïs got this out of the library and I read it a few months before my own, much less scary/deadly cancer diagnosis (I had an operation in January to remove three ribs and a tumour, and we're waiting for final pathology, but chances are extremely good that except for recovering from the surgery I am back to normal). I loved it, and my own cancer experience was different enough from Ritvo's that I'm glad I read it then, because while I don't think it would have made any real difference (I had no significant symptoms, no chemo or radiation, and now have basically a clean bill of health) I would have wondered. Anyway, words kind of fail me about the subject matter here, but it's an excellent book of poetry and it's a damn shame that we won't get more of Ritvo's work, and you can feel that pulsing through nearly every line.

[M. Gaffney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange and beautiful.

[Chelsea Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ritvo pulls readers into his heart-wrenching dreamscape and navigates them through the dizzying maze of loss, love, and a body in pain.

[Rue Solomon · Rating 4 out of 5]

but I split wrong. Only my mind split-
into an array of sirens with
show tunes played in between them.

Or maybe it was only my body
and that is why I am naked and bloody.

[Kari Napier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just ok... I mean some good some not so good. A meh review from me....

[Brett · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When I was about to die/my body lit up/like when I leave my house/without my wallet./What am I missing? I ask/patting my chest/pocket./and I am missing everything living/that won’t come with me/into this sunny afternoon" -Afternoon

This was a seriously impactful poetry collection. Heartbreaking sometimes, funny and sad without being cynical. These poems are easy to read and hard to forget. I chewed through this book in three sittings before lending it to a friend, but I definitely intend to read it again soon.

[Kerfe · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to separate these poems from the fact that they were written while Ritvo was dying of cancer at far too young an age. I that respect I feel that his talent will always remain mostly potential, unrealized.

There are some wonderful images

"When you weep, sorrow comes clean out"

"The man becomes a web
and his shadow becomes a spider"

but I felt in most cases the entirety of the poems did not live up to these gems.

But that is no reason not to look for, and savor, them, and wonder once again at the random finiteness of our years.

[Jo O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A moving collection of lean, wiry poems revolving around mortality from a young poet killed by cancer before it was published.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a challenging book to start, and it felt kind of uneven to me--some poems really struck me and others kind of went over my head. The collection, written in the face of a dire cancer diagnosis, has some different tones--he's not all down or all contemplative about his lot in life. Instead, we get a range of emotions, from angry, to happy, to sad, etc.

A survivor myself, I had previously had trouble reading Claudia Emerson's collection about cancer treatment (Impossible Bottle) because her experience was not an exact mirror of mine. I couldn't, at the time, distance myself from the topic I was reading about. And so I put that book down. I picked this book up, wondering if it might bring that insight or expression I had previously hoped for. Instead, I get lines like these:

"I thought my next thought would be a vision of my suffering;
I thought I would understand the yellow lightning in a painted storm--
the crucial way it disappears
when I imagine myself flung
headlong into the painting.
Instead I have this picture of dissatisfaction,
the thought not rising, but splitting in half" ("The Senses" 6).

What touched me the most are the poems about how his wife cares for him. When ill for a long time, one can feel like a burden:

"I wish you would let me know
how difficult it is to love me.
Then I would know you love me
beneath all that difficulty" ("Living it Up" 3).

We see his love for his life, the frustrations they both must deal with, and the beauty of them facing those struggles together.

There are other poems about different manners of perceiving death, that stick with me to varying degrees. Some are very pessimistic, while others are more contemplative. The senses, and their importance/loss, are mentioned throughout the collection.

Like I said, this book can really punch you in the face sometimes and can confuse you in other moments. I guess it's unfair and limiting to expect him to remain in one vein or train of thought, especially given the fact that he knew he was writing with the end in sight. It's unfair to not allow him some wandering space in his collection. Read this, dwell on this.

[Skjam! · Rating 2 out of 5]

"My genes are in mice, and not in the banal way that Man’s old genes are in the Beasts."

Max Ritvo was diagnosed with terminal cancer at age sixteen. Aggressive treatment put him into remission for some years, but the Ewing’s sarcoma came back during his senior year at Yale. During this time, he became a noted poet; Tom Waits was a big fan, I am told. Mr. Ritvo lived long enough to see advance copies of this book. but passed in August of 2016.

Mr. Ritvo’s cancer and his impending death are pervasive themes in his poetry, but are not the only things he writes about. He speaks of his love for his wife (sometimes in disturbing imagery), and moments of joy he has had.

This Milkweed Editions volume is handsome; the cover takes from his poem “Holding a Freshwater Fish in a Pail Above the Sea.” It’s a fine tribute to the author, and would look good on your shelf.

However, all the poems in the book are the modern poetry I don’t “get.” I honestly can’t tell if these are good or bad, and don’t feel any emotional connection to the work. Thus I cannot recommend this book to the casual reader; you will need to consult the opinions of people who actually know what they are talking about. Add a minimum of one star if you are into modern poetry.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book in a giveaway; no other compensation was offered or requested.