Overview

‘There’s something about being alive / that makes us cry out for help.’ Through visceral and vulnerable poetry, Ricky Ray meditates on the pain and powerlessness that comes with an awareness of our mortality. Finding joy through connecting with the natural world, Ricky navigates his ache of living. Allowing us to accompany him and his beloved service dog, Addie, through the scenic woodlands of Kansas, Illinois and Connecticut, the lines between humans, animals and nature blur. As he moves between forms both physical and elemental, we read of an existence which strives to be not ‘upon / but as one’ with the Earth. At the heart of this collection, which yearns for connections that have been lived, loved and lost, is the enduring comfort of life with an old brown dog.

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9781915789259

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Dr Maura Dooley said: “These moving, well-made poems follow the author’s meditative engagement with a beloved companion dog but also with creatures of other kinds and most particularly with the earth itself. These are poems of true immersion in the belief of the earth as Gaia, whilst at the same time making known and felt the author’s painful and disabling condition, his everyday life and his hopes for the future. Unlike any other collection I have come across, these poems are remarkable in their success in showing the reader both a deeply personal and a universal story.”

Author Information

Ricky Ray is the author of one full-length collection of poetry and two chapbooks: Fealty (Diode Editions, 2019); Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books, 2020); and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020), a finalist for The Laurel Prize. He was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and his awards include a Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, a Whisper River Poetry Prize, a Liam Rector Fellowship and a Zoeglossia Fellowship. His writing appears in numerous periodicals and anthologies, including Waxwing, Salamander, The American Scholar and The Moth. He has lectured on poetry, animism and integral ecology at Harvard and Yale, and he lives with his wife and his old brown dog in the old green hills of the Hudson Valley.

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