We Bed Down into Water: Poems (9780810151864): John Rybicki

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We Bed Down into Water: Poems

by John Rybicki

Northwestern University Press, 2008
Cloth: 978-0-8101-5187-1 | Paper: 978-0-8101-5186-4

ABOUT THIS BOOK

John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.

Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

John Rybicki is currently the Sandburg-Auden-Stein Poet-in-Residence at Olivet College. His published works include Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider and Traveling at High Speeds as well as poems in numerous anthologies and periodicals.

REVIEWS

"John Rybicki collects the ordinary elements of a work day, whether it's work at the tire shop or work at the desk 'cracking one sharp stone against a page until it sheds/the proper sparks . . .' These are the fruits of hard labor and love, a poet banging away until the beams are balanced, until life is balanced for one day against all the confusion and swirling called a life. It is love, after all, that begs this testimony, but it is devotion that allows it to flower into song." --Sandra Cisneros, best-selling author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo

"I cannot, dare not, will not commit the crime of commenting on Rybicki's verses. All I might do is cry with him, yet lack the courage to venture a feeling anywhere within the infernal precinct of this man's authenticity. Song, song--he, Rybicki is singing." --Gordon Lish

"John Rybicki has a hurricane heart, a hammer-heart, that is just waiting to unleash itself upon this perhaps undeserving world." --Rick Bass

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Acknowledgments	000
I
Thirty Years Ago	000
Julie Ann in the Bone Marrow Unit, Zion, Illinois	000				
Me and My Lass, We Are a Poem	000
Love Is the Heel That Knocks Hard Against the Floor	000
Tire Shop Poem	000
A Song for Kay Mullen	000
The Earth Is Not Quiet		000
Our Romance		000	
This Tape Measure Made of Light	000
Outside the Bone Marrow Unit	000
II
Interlochen Center for the Arts	000
The Violin Now, My God the Violin	000
Fire Psalm	000
Bulrushes	000
Two Movements for Martel Epperson	000
Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider	000
Say My Name		000
Her Body Like a Lantern Next to Me		000
Helena's Hair	000
Not Knowing Enough About Physics to Write This Poem	000
Long Before This Tenderness Between Us Was Born	000
So Quiet Sending	000
Snow	000
Fire Psalm Revisited	000
III
Julie Ovary Song	000
Sleep Piling Up, Sleep Coming On	000
The Story	000
This Sun	000
King	000
Saint Clare of Montefalco	000
Silhouette	000
The Boy	000
Three Lanterns	000

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