Ricochet Script

by Alexandra van de Kamp

Alexandra van de Kamp's Ricochet Script examines life as a plot slipping from our hands, veering in unexpected directions as years coalesce behind us. These poems bargain with time as a foreign, surreal, and elusive entity, where whole days can feel as if they were "written/in someone else's script." In vivid, at times playful musings, van de Kamp grapples with midlife, loss, and the strangeness of the body, while never forgetting the unrelenting beauty of being alive. These poems invoke a wide range of storylines, from Hitchcock's Lifeboat and spy thrillers to aging parents, to confront the unpredictable and ricocheting world.
Alexandra van de Kamp tells us "I want to make sense of abundance." In her beautifully wrought poems, we experience the sheer delight of all the sights, smells, and sounds of this world. Yet few poets are as deft at simultaneously evoking the precarity and consequent tenderness of existence. Van de Kamp's is a world made magical through art. She is canny, funny, filmic, but she can also stop your heart with the sudden apprehension of how time moves through us, "coaxing us / to bear something so much larger than ourselves."
--Sheila Black, co-editor of Beauty is a Verb , author of Iron Ardent

86 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2022

Reviews

[Ken Waldman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love how Alexandra van de Kamp loves words, syllables, sounds. And how she treats mortality, honing in on seasons, days, each very hour, because her life—and ours as hungry readers—depends on it. The poems are casually, carefully profound in their hugs, struggles, and magic. If you don't already know the poet personally, you'll want to meet her, your smart, new friend. If you already know the poet, you'll want to congratulate her for this book, make a date, and buy her a drink.

[Aaron Dietz]

Very nice. And some of these pieces teach clinics on line breaks.