Town Crier: Poems

Kabbalistic poems that recognize wit as a ritual of mourning, winner of the 2020 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize The poems in Town Crier wryly express the pervasive nature of loss, how it suffuses all aspects of a life: memories, hopes, love, sex, lunch. The death of the author’s dear friend, the late poet Max Ritvo, becomes the cornerstone of the book, a foundational pain along which the poems are aligned. The poems grieve. They try to cope. They come up short. They try again, insisting as...