With'rd

Across five sections of short, often unnamed poems, Ramsey's searing and personal collection grapples with the existence of being a poet before, during, and after making meaning through art. Sometimes, the speakers here ruminate on self-doubt ("It is not that I can't write, for I have written. Or / Was that some other infinite time?..."), and others lay bare the ways that mental illness can disrupt the creative process: "I long to write the words I once with ease composed, / To celebrate my life in poetry and prose, / But now the world is dark and luminous within, / I scratch the surface only and cannot get within.

Ramsey experiments with voice, point of view, and form throughout this slim collection. Some poems make use of dialogue, bringing the ruminations outside of the prevailing interiority. A few use blocks of text and a meditative tone to illustrate a scene, while others edge toward song structures, with rhythmic refrains and repeated lines. Ramsey often employs strong first-person narration, evoking the feeling of someone recording their deepest insecurities in a journal, but he also offers second person reassurances, perhaps to the reader, perhaps to the speaker: "Meaning falls from the sky at such alarming rates, / You are a human being, my love, you are a human / being..."

At times the many untitled poems can seem to bleed into each other as one long-form narration or meant to be enjoyed in sharp, separate bursts. In true postmodern tradition, Ramsey presents critiques of "the...twenty-first century / wasted mind" in conversation with larger philosophical questions of the self. In Ramsey's poetic world, no one problem is more legitimate than the next, rather compounding in how they impact the artist. He addresses the canon, then eschews it: "no longer do I aspire to the golden gate of poetry - / to the muses, Keats, Wordsworth, Collins, or Shelly, / but a poor muse, a humble muse will do, / who can be in the society of wretch." Instead, he finds his own way. - BOOKLIFE