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Max Ritvo

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Max Ritvo
Texts by this Poet: 
James Merrill and the Other World: Langdon Hammer in Conversation
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Max Ritvo was born on December 19, 1990 in Los Angeles, California. He received a BA from Yale University in 2013 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2016. He is the author of Four Reincarnations (Milkweed Editions, 2016) and Aeons (Poetry Society of America, 2015), selected by Jean Valentine to receive the 2014 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. In 2012, Ritvo served as an intern at the Academy of American Poets. He passed away on August 23, 2016.

by this poet

poem
Earthquake Country Before Final Chemotherapy
Max Ritvo
2018

For the first time tonight,
as I put my wife to bed
I didn't have to shove her off me.

She turned away in her sleep.

I wondered what was wrong with my chest.

I felt it, and the collar bone
spiked up, and where she'd rest
her cheek were ribs.

Who wants to cuddle a skeleton

poem
December 29
Max Ritvo
2018

I found myself unable to consume
the scallops after reflection—
their whole lives were 
eating and suffocating.

This is much sadder than tortured people—
in extreme pain we leave our bodies
and look down to commit the pain
to memory like studious

poem
Touching the Floor
Max Ritvo
2015

I touch my palms to the floor
and granite rhinos surge up my arms
and lock in my shoulders.
Water flecks on my back
and my head is shaved
by bladed cream.

But then my time in my body is up
and it’s time for my mind:
It seeks wisdom
and the rhinos fall into a well,

2
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