“Unreal City,” intones Mr. Eliot in his “The
Waste Land,” bracketed by “One must be so careful
these days” and “Under the brown fog of a winter dawn….
” Ruby writes “velocity,” athwart “toodle
to tabasco” and “orange sunshine.” What’s
cold and taut in Eliot—strained—is hot and loose in
Window on the City. While the poems
in the section by that name are realized in direct contemplation
of the Lower Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn—“The
North Tower Blinks All Night”—they are as much a matter
of reflection off the surface of a vocabulary, as we each are,
as on the windowpane: “The gray thrust/tails the chariots/of
melted heroines.” Further, there is nothing “unreal”
about Ruby’s stance toward the “city,” the Indo-European
cognate of which is “to lie” and “homestead.”
Rather, Ruby records the exact heart of how we can be “on”
and what happens there once located and turned—how we experience
the open—as places and feelings and bits of knowledge flow
and fire together to shine into a speckled block for a future
“of softening blue smells in the opening of loss/on snores/on
truculent fraud/to indenture to fumes/once there.” Many
write with words; Ruby with consciousness itself, which can only
be approached by its absence. There is nothing abstract about
this. It is here and here: “The softness of the teeth encouraged
us to eat” and “We better tiptoe/to the hollow giants.”
—Sam Truitt
About Michael
Ruby :
Michael Ruby’s first book of poems, At an Intersection,
was published in 2002 by Alef Books in New York. A book of prose
poetry, Fleeting Memories, is being published
this year as an e-book by Ugly Duckling Presse in Brooklyn. He
is also the editor of Washtenaw County Jail and Other
Writings by David Herfort, a 1970s prison memoir
published by Xlibris in 2005. Recent poems have been published
or are forthcoming in print journals Rattapallax, The Seneca Review,
syllogism, Fell Swoop, Lost & Found Times, Lungfull! and Torch;
and in e-zines xStream, Aught, The Big Bridge, La Petite Zine,
Sidereality, Shampoo, Castagraf, Unpleasant Event Schedule, word
for/word, GutCult, tin lustre mobile, ampersand and Dusie, as
well as in single-author issues of Mudlark and Poethia. Michael
Ruby lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and works as a journalist.
Product Information: Poetry
Of Interest:
At
an Intersection, Alef Books (January 2003)
Review From Publishers Weekly
Of the 29 poems Michael Ruby has composed for At an Intersection,
it may be the "Overexposed Faces" that endure the longest:
"A face behind a comb's teeth/ A face splashed with blue
dye/ A face behind bars." Ruby, who works at the copy desk
of the Wall Street Journal, completed an MFA at Brown in the early
'80s, letting this debut come together as poems crossed his path:
"Now that they're so near,/ in one of the cubbyholes at/
my post office branch,/ I should be celebrating." His book
is the seventh title for Alef Books, which won support from the
Academy of American Poets' Eric Mathieu King fund. Copyright
2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
http://www.lapetitezine.org/MichaelRuby.htm
Buy
it Now!
