Almost a Memoir

by M.C. Rydel

What would you do if you knew the month of your death? How would you survive that month every year? How would you take advantage of your eleven months of immortality?

Almost a Memoir, a new book of poems by M.C. Rydel, poses this question and others with a collection of lyrical narratives and metaphysical conceits. Performed since 2010 as spoken word poetry in bars, bookstores, theatres, and coffeehouses in cities as diverse as Chicago, New York, Grand Rapids, Flagstaff, and Sedona, this book of poems is almost a narrative, almost personal experience, almost faraway, and almost a memoir, yet it is always about loss & change, work & family, friends & lovers, cats & dogs, moths & bats, and Pablo Neruda & Joseph Brodsky.

This book brings poems from the stage to the page by describing interrupted dreams, heroic and ironic journeys, villanelles, pantoums, ballads, and thirteen poems from the plague year of 2020. Over 100 characters appear in 67 poems. They live in an apophatic universe. Created and then abandoned. They find themselves looking for signs of divinity in a godless world.

124 pages, Paperback

Published August 9, 2022

Reviews

[Literary Reviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost a Memoir by M.C Rydel is a book of thought-provoking poems that are based on many experiences we go through in life and our actions and ways of dealing with it. The poems touch upon death, immortality, family, love, and many more topics.

Rydel’s poetry is deep and observant and make the reader think about life and the impact they have made on others. The author has survived more than anyone should have to, and has a lot of hard things from their life to grapple with, things they have done, and many things others have done to them. The author is candid when sharing those potent memories with us.

The ability to perceive, empathically and intellectually, and the will to live despite intense suffering in isolation, weave throughout this collection. The last two years, people had to deal with isolation, but most people have lived with feelings of isolation before it was so prevalent. Most people put up a façade, and never express the depths of their pain. The poem Our Collection of Masks is the perfect example of this and shows how we were all wearing masks before it all started. Another poem that exemplifies the American experience of the last 30 years is You’ve Won Fifty Dollars in a Million-dollar Lottery. Rydel’s words and thoughts are powerful and expressive and evokes emotion in the reader.

I think this influential collection will help people take a look at themselves internally, especially the aspects of themselves that has remained hidden for far too long. Areas that people have been afraid to think about, let alone talk about. These carefully-crafted verses will help people begin to process what they have endured, even people whose stories are very different. I highly recommend this book of impactful poetry to readers who enjoy stirring poems that will have them pondering a variety of life’s experiences.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

A certain melancholy suffuses the 67 deeply personal poems in this debut collection by spoken-word poet and academic M.C. Rydel. Yet, glimmers of sly humor appear in many poems, shining an absurdist existential perspective on matters of death and immortality, the occult and religious belief, and obscurity and fame. As with many such collections, these poems are uneven in quality and execution, but a dozen or so are standouts, including the opening poem “Months of Immortality,” “A Call for Missionaries,” “Giving It All Away,” “Elegy for a Merchant Marine,” “A Feast During the Plague—A Song,” and the closing poem, which serves as a bookend (literally and figuratively), “You’re Already in Heaven.” Rydel experiments throughout this volume with structure (free verse, prose poetry, and formal patterns) but always vividly captures telling details. He has a knack for creating unusual juxtapositions that startle the reader into a new awareness. And his original use of commonplace images, exotic references, and melodic wording make passages in even his more obscure or imperfect poems worth a look.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rydel captures the missed connection, the possibility of what could be, the conversation between what is and what might have been. Chicago serves as the stage for his poetic personas to explore who they are in a world where they might die for two seconds or fall victim to relentless mistaken identity.