Rest Cure
Poetry chapbook. Finalist (excerpt from Post-Apothecary) for 2009 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry
Review •
"If you get the thing done right as Ridley does here and as you might find, for example in much of the work of Ann Carson, what you get is a body that gives off a glow. An energy cast, appropriately, into a straightjacketing form that nonetheless beats at it, again appropriately, like blood through a vein. Beats against it and withdraws, and then repeats. Done repeatedly there's a structure of reverberation that affects every subsequent line exponentially. One of the things this allows the poem to do is paradoxically expand its meaning as it progresses, even as the forms apparent on each page begin to contract, moving more and more closely to stillness, and to individual heavy lines, to some that may fragment under their own weight, or need to be couched in even more stabilizing and stricter stanza forms. A language that might touch on the experiences of laudanum, ether, and hemorrhaging presented here. The Beckett trick, the minimalist paradox. You can call the whole thing Dionysius and Apollo instead if you like, I don't think it will mind. It's a paradox that also depends significantly on the propulsive, heady, and above all sensuous quality..." Jamie Bradley for Bywords
Published by Apt. 9 Press in 2009
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