APRIL AT THE RUINS

"Every poem in April at the Ruins is a powerhouse: rich, quietly essential, profoundly lucid. Many have flavors of the best parables or folk tales, bringing us into intimate relation with mysteries and transformations abounding around and inside us. The book's title accurately encapsulates Raab's role as negative capability ninja, evoking both spring's beginnings and the flotsam and jetsam of endings. Opposite possibilties and alternative scenarios thrive side by side within the marvelous, snow-globe-like worlds of his poems: what did happen or what might have, the questionable nature of revelation, the slipperiness of the stories we tell ourselves, how we live suspended between death and utter loveliness. Raab's sense of irony is unerring. These poems prove that one of the only true forms of consolation is giving darkness its due. -- Amy Gerstler"--