Post-Fondness by Michael O’Ryan

Post-Fondness is a collection of poems that grounds the reader in the disquieting standpoint between before and after. In this collection, both speaker and setting are cloaked in the absence of light; O’Ryan asks us to pause here in the twilight, the desolate, and find the wonder in the impermanent. The noir elements of this collection do not give way to nihilism, but the contrary, through its concise documentations of the weight of the everyday.

–Stephanie Kaylor, Reviews Editor for Glass: A Journal of Poetry

“Don’t you miss the fields?” asks Michael O’Ryan in Post-Fondness, inaugurating a site of reckoning in a chapbook that goes on to question, directly, the “Lord” of a landscape that’s understood only as “a kind of soft / rolling blue”—at times, “wicked”; at others, “moonlit”.

 –Talin Tahajian, Poetry Editor for The Adroit Journal      

“Imagine/ your song/ being ripped/ from your/ throat,” Michael O’Ryan writes in his chapbook Post-Fondness. It is a collection haunted by impermanence. This book weaves through an interpersonal conflict with mortality, its daily collision within the body, its confrontations and resignations. These poems ask us to consider how we might write about and live through the pain of materiality, the callousness of memory, and the incumbent uncertainty of the elastic now. You will read this book and know you are a little less alone.

–Julianne Neely, Author of The Body Beside Herself