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Ring Shot: poems by
Ring Shot is a collection of prose poems which explores the married life from the viewpoint of a willing captive. The duality that exists in us all is on display here, where we want what we want but don't necessarily want to pay the price.
27 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 28, 2021
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January 15, 2022
Mirrors and Oranges
In “Shade,” set in the middle of this collection of twenty-three prose poems, the speaker, a married woman, addresses her “mate.” “Peel me an orange and feed it to me. This imperative statement is prefaced by “As long as I’m free to make another request,” but she’s not asking, rather telling, like a command. This image itself in a sense is role reversal, the man feeds the woman, it also suggests affection, nurturing, brightness—things in stark contrast to broken things, the step, the lamp, the vase, not only in “Shade” but in other poems. Here, it’s a lamp the speaker has “crushed,” a vase she has broken. In this poem and others the mate is addressed, and towards the end of “Shade,” she says, “but you like my functional bounce.” Misty Rampart, in this collection, isn’t doing anything new, or better than what she has done in previous books of poems, but again she asks a lot, demands a lot of the reader, and gives a lot in return. To read these poems is to be shook up, in a good way.
Towards the end of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Doll House, Torvald the husband asks Nora the wife, something like “Don’t you feel a responsibility to me, to your children, to your parents, to society, and to God? Her answer is, “I have a greater responsibility, to myself.” Like Nora, Ring Shot’s affirmation is “First, and foremost I am a human being!”
“I could instead peel your cover, revealing a hulking trail that leads me to where I behave because of the jittery glue that keeps the inevitable crash at bay.”
The above is the beginning of the third part of “Extra.” The speaker is a wife talking to her husband. Who talks like this? No one, but this speaker. No one says it quite like her, here and elsewhere in this book. This sentence is taken out of context, but it’s fair to say it’s a sexual reference. In the second part of this poem she says, “I could walk away but that would be foolish. Who would paint the walls? Who would lick them like an art?” Then, in the third part there’s the qualifier “instead.” No where in these sentences is there any preconceived poetic language; all is original, fresh, striking. To read “Extra” and the other poems is to immerse oneself in the music of this vital and often probing voice. You see, you feel, sometimes with a jolt, the power of a voice saying things because the speaker must say them.
Earlier in this review, there was the orange image, the image of the mate, as the speaker often calls her spouse, feeding her the orange. “Sentence,” the last poem, concludes with a another touch image, the two spouses close, “your hand in mind, but it’s not any romanticized fiction, this marriage, this closeness; any sentimentality is undercut by “leaving you shivering with your hand in mine, then, the total surprise, the unexpected “like this hurried test you call a marriage.” Where does that come from, that originality? A place similar to the place in “Enjoy,” with its road metaphor. “We once made love in a van and fogged the windows. Our hearts expanded to the road ahead, one where I would fold your laundry while you clear your throat.” Again, the wife addresses her husband, to whom she says in “Rent” “Your violent and curvy skin I can’t escape from.” But there is another side, or rather many sides, it seems, to this marriage. In “Pear” the speaker refers to “everlasting lust.” In this “lush paradise where people plant..crops,” the two will “meddle through, creating a..bouncy pastoral, scattered all over the way (pun) we walk.”
In “Rent” the speaker says, “I can’t find or define a woman as a mate, not at the risk of destroying the base my life is built upon.” Yet a woman other than the speaker has brought a blueberry cake into “Alike Pies.” The speaker remarks to herself and her readers, “She’s a..beauty and you’re enchanted. She tells herself “You can stay home while the clouds…scatter gray emotions…like nine inch heels across the dance floor can close a dusty place down.” So unexpected, and exacting in the context of the poem., which concludes on “Like all beauties I’m knit into their agonizing death ray. It’s not mature.” Consider what the end would be without that add on, that is so vital a part to the end of “Alike Pies.” The speaker talks to herself aloud in “Truthful Psalms,” about a woman. “You can see a colossal crush coming but you don’t care.” It’s not unreasonable to assume this is the same woman in “Alike Pies,” as “Truthful” moves toward its end. “It’s hard to believe that while I’m sleepy you’re over at your place baking.” In “Your Flower” the speaker says, to the other woman, “With your tray of blueberry cake you made me aware of your flower..” The speaker suggests: your flower is what I am drawn to, my desire for you, my attraction, my arousal. “Analyze it like summer, never finding an answer.” Another poem “Recumbent Females” is addressed to another woman, “I will go home to him, frail. I will come back to you, aspiring.
In that same poem, the speaker says “Some prefer to be blind, apathetic. I’d rather be brash and face the punishment.” She sees herself for who she is, with no delusions. The first poem in the collection, “Flesh” is about mirror and memory. The very first sentence is emblematic of the voice we come to know.
“The cats have found the toothpaste cap and just let me slip into a mournful daze thinking about the highfalutin perfect tens out there who aren’t reflected in my bathroom mirror.”
The toothpaste cap rendered in a playful image, the unexpected “highfalutin” the unexpected “perfect tens” who are present in words, and thoughts, yet absent in flesh, peaking over the speaker’s shoulder—all this entices a reader into the world of “Flesh.” There’s humor, there’s irony, there’s a lot compacted into a few words, the precision of language. This poem is followed by “Pear” in which the speaker says, “The nerve of some people to despair or scorn while the diggers dig up coal for them, for you, for me.” And that comes after the “everlasting lust,” from the paradisial to the underground, the highs and the lows—the extraordinary and the mundane. “I try to grip some level of omniscient understanding. He watches basketball and complains about a sore tooth.”
Family, society, God, and self are all presences in Ring Shots, but not in any doctrinaire way. Rampart is serious, funny, probing, skeptical, certain, satirical, a keen observer of things and people, and her own reflection, her own life. This book is about a marriage, and more. “Taste” concludes with “I wear his crown while a cemetery though waves its grandiose goodbyes.” Interestingly, she wears his crown. She is here, making the most of her life. The bridge between life and death is love; that’s not stated anywhere but that is what comes through in Misty Rampart’s Ring Shots. She is an original, saying things the way only she can say them. Like Nora in The Doll House, the speaker in these poems is aware of the responsibility she has to herself, and she’s not selfish, not greedy; in looking at her we see ourselves.
In “Shade,” set in the middle of this collection of twenty-three prose poems, the speaker, a married woman, addresses her “mate.” “Peel me an orange and feed it to me. This imperative statement is prefaced by “As long as I’m free to make another request,” but she’s not asking, rather telling, like a command. This image itself in a sense is role reversal, the man feeds the woman, it also suggests affection, nurturing, brightness—things in stark contrast to broken things, the step, the lamp, the vase, not only in “Shade” but in other poems. Here, it’s a lamp the speaker has “crushed,” a vase she has broken. In this poem and others the mate is addressed, and towards the end of “Shade,” she says, “but you like my functional bounce.” Misty Rampart, in this collection, isn’t doing anything new, or better than what she has done in previous books of poems, but again she asks a lot, demands a lot of the reader, and gives a lot in return. To read these poems is to be shook up, in a good way.
Towards the end of Henrik Ibsen’s play The Doll House, Torvald the husband asks Nora the wife, something like “Don’t you feel a responsibility to me, to your children, to your parents, to society, and to God? Her answer is, “I have a greater responsibility, to myself.” Like Nora, Ring Shot’s affirmation is “First, and foremost I am a human being!”
“I could instead peel your cover, revealing a hulking trail that leads me to where I behave because of the jittery glue that keeps the inevitable crash at bay.”
The above is the beginning of the third part of “Extra.” The speaker is a wife talking to her husband. Who talks like this? No one, but this speaker. No one says it quite like her, here and elsewhere in this book. This sentence is taken out of context, but it’s fair to say it’s a sexual reference. In the second part of this poem she says, “I could walk away but that would be foolish. Who would paint the walls? Who would lick them like an art?” Then, in the third part there’s the qualifier “instead.” No where in these sentences is there any preconceived poetic language; all is original, fresh, striking. To read “Extra” and the other poems is to immerse oneself in the music of this vital and often probing voice. You see, you feel, sometimes with a jolt, the power of a voice saying things because the speaker must say them.
Earlier in this review, there was the orange image, the image of the mate, as the speaker often calls her spouse, feeding her the orange. “Sentence,” the last poem, concludes with a another touch image, the two spouses close, “your hand in mind, but it’s not any romanticized fiction, this marriage, this closeness; any sentimentality is undercut by “leaving you shivering with your hand in mine, then, the total surprise, the unexpected “like this hurried test you call a marriage.” Where does that come from, that originality? A place similar to the place in “Enjoy,” with its road metaphor. “We once made love in a van and fogged the windows. Our hearts expanded to the road ahead, one where I would fold your laundry while you clear your throat.” Again, the wife addresses her husband, to whom she says in “Rent” “Your violent and curvy skin I can’t escape from.” But there is another side, or rather many sides, it seems, to this marriage. In “Pear” the speaker refers to “everlasting lust.” In this “lush paradise where people plant..crops,” the two will “meddle through, creating a..bouncy pastoral, scattered all over the way (pun) we walk.”
In “Rent” the speaker says, “I can’t find or define a woman as a mate, not at the risk of destroying the base my life is built upon.” Yet a woman other than the speaker has brought a blueberry cake into “Alike Pies.” The speaker remarks to herself and her readers, “She’s a..beauty and you’re enchanted. She tells herself “You can stay home while the clouds…scatter gray emotions…like nine inch heels across the dance floor can close a dusty place down.” So unexpected, and exacting in the context of the poem., which concludes on “Like all beauties I’m knit into their agonizing death ray. It’s not mature.” Consider what the end would be without that add on, that is so vital a part to the end of “Alike Pies.” The speaker talks to herself aloud in “Truthful Psalms,” about a woman. “You can see a colossal crush coming but you don’t care.” It’s not unreasonable to assume this is the same woman in “Alike Pies,” as “Truthful” moves toward its end. “It’s hard to believe that while I’m sleepy you’re over at your place baking.” In “Your Flower” the speaker says, to the other woman, “With your tray of blueberry cake you made me aware of your flower..” The speaker suggests: your flower is what I am drawn to, my desire for you, my attraction, my arousal. “Analyze it like summer, never finding an answer.” Another poem “Recumbent Females” is addressed to another woman, “I will go home to him, frail. I will come back to you, aspiring.
In that same poem, the speaker says “Some prefer to be blind, apathetic. I’d rather be brash and face the punishment.” She sees herself for who she is, with no delusions. The first poem in the collection, “Flesh” is about mirror and memory. The very first sentence is emblematic of the voice we come to know.
“The cats have found the toothpaste cap and just let me slip into a mournful daze thinking about the highfalutin perfect tens out there who aren’t reflected in my bathroom mirror.”
The toothpaste cap rendered in a playful image, the unexpected “highfalutin” the unexpected “perfect tens” who are present in words, and thoughts, yet absent in flesh, peaking over the speaker’s shoulder—all this entices a reader into the world of “Flesh.” There’s humor, there’s irony, there’s a lot compacted into a few words, the precision of language. This poem is followed by “Pear” in which the speaker says, “The nerve of some people to despair or scorn while the diggers dig up coal for them, for you, for me.” And that comes after the “everlasting lust,” from the paradisial to the underground, the highs and the lows—the extraordinary and the mundane. “I try to grip some level of omniscient understanding. He watches basketball and complains about a sore tooth.”
Family, society, God, and self are all presences in Ring Shots, but not in any doctrinaire way. Rampart is serious, funny, probing, skeptical, certain, satirical, a keen observer of things and people, and her own reflection, her own life. This book is about a marriage, and more. “Taste” concludes with “I wear his crown while a cemetery though waves its grandiose goodbyes.” Interestingly, she wears his crown. She is here, making the most of her life. The bridge between life and death is love; that’s not stated anywhere but that is what comes through in Misty Rampart’s Ring Shots. She is an original, saying things the way only she can say them. Like Nora in The Doll House, the speaker in these poems is aware of the responsibility she has to herself, and she’s not selfish, not greedy; in looking at her we see ourselves.
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