Death of the Coppertone Girl
"Kevin Ridgeway is a survivor. As other poets these days (including myself) gather vignettes of streetlife from afar, or still dull their brains with chemicals, or teeter on the middle aged tightrope of moderation making monuments to fading glory days; Kevin Ridgeway white knuckles through these bleak times cracking compassionate visions of contemporary characters popping across the page. This is a dispatch from halfway houses, sober living facilities, the frontlines of America. Here are feverish fractals of elaborate blues in cascading Kerouac long lines, telescoping through tunnels of family memories, collapsing into a fading photoplay like a ghost reporting from a future he sometimes doesn't think he deserves. Somehow his writing is melancholy but funny, grounded but surreal, skillful but fresh. It's something worth living for, worth struggling for, and definitely worth reading and enjoying."
- Westley Heine, author of Busking Blues, Street Corner Spirits, Cloud Watching in the Inferno, and others.
"There's a chapter in Ray Chandler's The Little Sister, where Marlowe drives forties L.A night rattling off all the falsehood gloss of Los Angeles, it's well fixed demons. Occasionally, while driving, while bearing witness, Marlowe stops ranting, reminding himself he's not human tonight. Now, Ridgeway comes along with his coppertone girls, art deco theaters with dollar dogs and all the ghosts of growing up on the other side of the palm tree. You know the black and white of Bunker Hill with cigarette smoke and desperation rising like Angel's Flight herself. These poems may not be Chandler, but they got a hard won grit, an unsatisfied howling that sits with us in all our broken moments. The times where all we have left is our honesty and just enough of sense of humor to keep us alive. If you live the poem, do yourself a favor, crack this book and hang your heartbreaks together."
-Jason Baldinger American Aorta
Kintsugi is the Japanese art wherein the artisan repairs broken pottery with gold which both strengthens the breaks and fissures, but also transforms those imperfections into unique features of sometimes stunning beauty. Kevin Ridgeway's poems do that too. They insist that we look deeply into the shattered lives, the economic precarity, and the mental and emotional stakes of just trying to get by in this country. Ridgeway writes, "nobody wins here", and these spare, translucent poems speak that truth in every line. They are also veined in gold and that's Ridgeway's art, it's one of reassurance and repair. He's a companion for the long roads, a voice that helps us carry on.
-Kristofer Collins writes about books in Pittsburgh, PA. His latest poetry collection is "The Vesper Room".
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