Ready or Not by Robin Wright

Ready or Not takes you on a roller coaster ride of love and losses. You get the whole of life in a beloved son and the lasting attachments with family and friends who support you. You lose your uncle, a dear friend, and even your mother in the poem, Alzheimer’s, a disease that leaves her “stumbling away from what you once knew.”  In the end, Ready or Not, you are left on your own to handle life’s challenges. This chapbook offers a dizzy read about the hope and loss that makes life worth living.

–Ingrid Bruck, author of Finding Stella Maris

In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman states, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The wonderful thing about figurative language is that it can be applied to a reader’s thought processes in many ways. For me, the truth of this statement lies at the heart of what makes a poem. “I am large” can be a reality that applies to very few words and “I contain multitudes” can easily be connected to the universality of specific images. A good example of what I mean is most certainly found in Robin Wright’s sparse but hauntingly beautiful poems in her new chapbook Ready or Not. In a few pages Wright explores the connections between love and loss, which have always been a vital part of the human experience, with candor and with language that is fresh, accessible, and artful. The imagery does exactly what you would expect good poetry to do. It makes us feel what we already know. In “What This Woman Wants” she writes, “I want you to want me like wind/ blowing through you…shaking you until you forget there’s anything outside the window, the room, the bed,” and you not only understand the love, you feel the passion. When she writes about observing someone close struggling with Alzheimer’s and describes “a bruised mind trying to light a fire of remembrance,” the loss perceived is terrifying. This book is a must read not only for fans of good poetry but fans of life as well.

–Jim McGarrah, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award and author of A Balancing Act