A Void and Cloudless Sky by Ricki Cummings

The sky might be void and cloudless in Ricki Cummings’ poems, but don’t mistake its emptiness as a sign of absence. Instead, A Void and Cloudless Sky burns with intelligence and roils with desire. These poems are planted firmly in an hallucinatory theater of the absurd whose conceptual blueprint is one part Samuel Beckett and one part Philip K. Dick: “There was supposed to be a metaphor here / but instead it’s maps and pins / and bits of string and wild hair / and cigarettes and unemployment.”

–Tony Trigilio, author of Proof Something Happened and The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood))

A short and sharp and fast and dense and absolutely gorgeous collection. Alternately breathless and measured, Cummings’ pages bristle with multi-prong puns and genre-obliterating cultural allusions. A Void and Cloudless Sky is packed with highbrow references and lofi phrases that beg to be verbalized, to be invoked. A toothsome shock of poems.

–Meredith Yayanos, co-editor of Coilhouse Magazine, musician

Ricki Cummings’ stunning collection, A Void and Cloudless Sky, is a love affair of language and culture. A striking depiction of the battle of being human. You’ll find Kurt Weill, DC Comics, Derrida, and box wine in a single breath. But the real power lies in its vulnerability. “…The answer / to the question / of what is this poem about / is the body. Always the body.” The body subsists in and out of time—in memory, liminal spaces, and the exposed—until the body, like this collection of poems, creates its own space “ever-present, / unsettling, beautiful.”

–Shannon Elward, author of Third Lung Breathing