Every Ravening Thing: Poems: Pitt Poetry Series

“Every Ravening Thing is the most exciting book I’ve read in a very long time. At its heart is a profound empathy for human suffering of all kinds, but the poems offer neither solace nor cure. Each feels like a brave experiment that extracts a question from the world then answers it. In almost every poem I feel an unanticipated shock of recognition, which happens only when profundity, clarity, and a fierce allegiance to truth combine in one intelligence. Tough, searing, and dangerous, these are among the rare necessary poems of our age.” —Chase Twichell

"Every Ravening Thing presents a matchless intensity and intellectual grit, a fearless investigation into the world amplified by a vision that is both cosmic and detailed in our common suffering.  This is a brave book of poetry.” —Christopher Buckley

“What is ferocious – ravenous – here is the poet’s driven need to tell things as they truly are, which means it’s not always a pretty picture that she so carefully assembles for the reader. And I love the raucous regard she has for diction: reckless and powerfully inventive and fresh the way air can be fresh.  All of this is held together by a commitment to the music that drives these poems in a way that soothes the ear.  Every Ravening Thing could serve as a warning to all of us about our failures as men and women, and as a celebration of the good we’re capable of doing and in that way is a necessary part of our reading.” —Bruce Weigl
 

Marsha de la O is the author of Antidote for Night, winner of the 2015 Isabella Gardner Award, and Black Hope, winner of the New Issues Press Poetry Prize and winner of an Editor’s Choice, Small Press Book Award. Other awards include the Morton Marcus Poetry Award and the da Poetry Award. She has published extensively, including recent poems in The New Yorker and the Kenyon Review, with work forthcoming in Prairie Schooner. De La O lives in Ventura, California, with her husband, poet and editor Phil Taggart. Together, they produce poetry readings and events in Ventura County and edit the literary journal Spillway.
 

Keats at Fourteen
                        
She dozes, her nails fretted against the linen’s border,
a hectic rose flaming each cheek. Her lips move, no words.
The boy is guardian spirit, no one but he enters this sickroom
where his mother fades, home finally after six years—failures,
disgrace. Scarlet daughter, neighbors hiss, slave to appetite,
but John is single-minded—she will live. No one but he gives her
the tincture of mercury—one tenth of a grain daily, dabs the sweat
of her fevers away, a basket of withered poppies at his feet. He pierces
each capsule with a needle, drops it in a small glazed crock to warm
near the stove, sweat out the opium. Then he’ll add wine, saffron,
nutmeg.  It takes time, the hour darkens.  He cups his hand
to light the votive.  She moans a furred voice from webbed lungs,
a cup of black blood brimming, the pilgrim is fleeing the City,
he leans in closer, the City of Destruction, takes her clammy hand,
that place also where he was born, so close now he’s breathing her,
“Johnny,” she cries, “lift me up, Johnny, your father is here in the room.”
 

"Every Ravening Thing is the most exciting book I’ve read in a very long time." —Chase Twichell