All at Once

Reviews / Votes

"I love this book so much. These poems make me laugh. They make me cry. They make me fall quiet. They make me stop and look back and forth. They make me love my life." -- Li-Young Lee, author of 'The Invention of the Darling' and co-translator of 'Dao De Jing' "Jack Ridl is one of the most clear-eyed, open-hearted poets working today. His poems always exhibit what Dacher Keltner has called "moral beauty," that quality which keeps us in constant awe of human goodness. His latest collection, All at Once, is no exception, with its unflinching focus on the best and worst of humanity, revealing how we are all "caught in the web" of our connectedness. These timely poems remind us: "Here we must waken, roll away the stone," and stay open to each other and our world." -- James Crews, author of 'Kindness Will Save the World: Stories of Compassion & Connection' "'I fill much of my day with memories. / They come. They just come," Jack Ridl writes in an early poem in his new collection, All at Once, capturing for us the surf-like oscillations of the past as it breaches our present tense. Ridl plumbs the past in order to follow the breadcrumbs to the depths of who he is, and to provide a key to the mystery of his survival. "One day a therapist stared hard / into my eyes, fiercely said, 'You're an orphan, // have always been an orphan,'" he writes, and it is that orphan-sorrow, for a "soft-spoken father's / lack of answers, [a] mother's disinterest," that pulses through and instigates these pages. The ballast is the present tense, which he writes with an elegant hand and witnessing eye. He reminds us of the comfort of hot coffee, a made bed, "the star-pricked sky with the uneven lantern light / of the moon," the companionship of animals, and "butter burr spreading under the white pines." Jack Ridl is a poet whose poetry has occupied his life's center, attested to by the number of poems he dedicates to beloved writers, acknowledging the connective tissue, the communal web. "Galway! When did this happen?" he asks, addressing the now-missing. "Adrienne? Bill? / Seamus? Etheridge, Nancy, Jane, Allen, Lucille," though as with Theodore Roethke, a profound life force comes surging back, "the anarchy of mud and seed / says not yet to the blood's crawl." I feel grateful for the "not yet" that gives us more work by this tradesman-poet, who continues to add something good to a world he was taught was not." -- Diane Seuss, author of 'frank: sonnets' "'News from the heart!' All at Once brings us poems pierced with loss, grief, violence and desperation and stitched together with devotion, connection, beauty and love. Jack Ridl shows us again how to "push aside the mulch and dig," how to say the unsayable, how to listen for the unspoken, and how to meet this terrible and generous world." -- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of 'All the Honey'