The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Kaveh Akbar, Shon Arieh-Lerer, Justin Boening, Sarah Blake, and Ariella Ritvo-Slifka about Max Ritvo's Four Reincarnations. Max Ritvo died on August 23, 2016.
Faith is about action, Professor Wiesel said that day. Faith is about what you do with that faith. Belief in God is to do, not to accept. So always the question: what can we do?
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
I think back and then here, where I can only think of beasts with stains: oil and blood. They have become as familiar as an oil-stained cloth in a garage, or the things we ignore, just there in the light.