All at Once
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The poems in Jack Ridl’s latest collection All at Once are each structured as a lyrical collage that gazes in a rearview mirror over his 80 years of being, in the words of William Stafford, “an alien in an alien world, making himself at home.” Nothing eludes this poet’s attention, realization, quandary, reflection, poignancy, joy. His poems, while written in a direct style and gentle voice, weave together what usually does not belong together, leading us to experience the reality that neither ourselves nor wherever we are is just one thing. In the words of his daughter when she was seven, “Daddy, ‘with’ is the most important word in the world because we are always ‘with.’” Each poem reveals the infinite realities of “With.”

from Ten Inches of Snow Overnight
Again, I see myself walking back and
forth in the psych ward. God didn’t
know I was there. The doors were locked.
I had a window so I could watch the visitors
scraping the snow from their cars then
pull out and head home, maybe have
something to drink, have a show to watch,
fall asleep. Even if they had an answer,
no one dared to talk about me. I now
sleep beside my wife of forty years. . .
from Because of William Stafford
I walked to the river.
It didn’t say a word.
I walked into the river.
It moved on by.
I walked to the old oak.
It didn’t say a word.
I sat under its old branches.
The leaves fell around me.
I walked to the robin’s nest.
It didn’t say a word.
I watched the mother fly to a nearby branch.
Small heads rose.
I love this book so much. These poems make me laugh. They make me cry. They make me fall quiet. They make me stop and look back and forth. They make me love my life.
—Li-Young Lee, author of The Invention of the Darling and cotranslator (with Yun Wang) of the definitive Dao De Jing
Jack Ridl is one of the most clear-eyed, open-hearted poets working today. His poems always exhibit what Dacher Keltner has called “moral beauty,” that quality which keeps us in constant awe of human goodness. His latest collection, All at Once, is no exception, with its unflinching focus on the best and worst of humanity, revealing how we are all “caught in the web” of our connectedness. These timely poems remind us: “Here we must waken, roll away the stone,” and stay open to each other and our world.
—James Crews, author of Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion and Connection
Jack Ridl’s new collection, All at Once, captures for us the surf-like oscillations of the past as it breaches our present tense. Ridl plumbs the past in order to follow the breadcrumbs to the depths of who he is, and to provide a key to the mystery of his survival. “One morning my therapist stared hard / into my eyes, then fiercely said, ‘You’re an orphan, // have always been an orphan,’” he writes, and it is that orphan-sorrow, for a “father’s lack of answers, [a] mother’s disinterest,” that pulses through and instigates these pages. The ballast is the present tense, which he writes with an elegant hand and witnessing eye. He reminds us of the comfort of hot coffee, a made bed, “the star-pricked sky with the uneven lantern light / of the moon,” the companionship of animals, and “butterbur spreading under the white pines.” Jack Ridl is a poet whose poetry has occupied his life’s center, attested to by the number of poems he dedicates to beloved writers, acknowledging the connective tissue, the communal web. “Galway! When did this happen?” he asks, addressing the now-missing. “Adrienne? Bill? / Charles? Etheridge, Nancy, Jane, Jerry, Lucille,” though as with Theodore Roethke, a profound life force comes surging back, “the anarchy of mud and seed / says not yet to the blood’s crawl.” I feel grateful for the “not yet” that gives us more work by this tradesman-poet, who continues to add something good to a world he was taught was not.
—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets
“‘News from the heart!’” All at Once brings us poems pierced with loss, grief, violence, and desperation stitched together with devotion, connection, beauty, and love. Jack Ridl shows us again how to “push aside the mulch and dig,” how to say the unsayable, how to listen for the unspoken, and how to meet this terrible and generous world.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of All the Honey and host of The Poetic Path
108 pages
Jack Ridl
Pub date – October 2024
Trade paper – 6 x 9″
$18
ISBN:978-1-960327-06-2
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