For AM Ringwalt, the interrogative is imperative, genre a stage for syntax's forensic choreography, the lyric an elixir perfused with both the cosmic and the humane. Another word for such exact and exacting abundance might be song. It might be grace.
- Joyelle McSweeney, author of Death Styles
With a magnolia blooming to Edith Piaf's tremolo and tortured cadence for a talisman, we join the poet on a hunt for a crime unremembered or a criminalized memory, or the point at which the self becomes an accomplice in its own upheaval as renewal. Histrionic at the prospect of the numbness and anhedonia that might come from healing, we often turn suffering into an adventure, and find it seductive, its own economy built on the erotics of distress. Many do this all their lives. AM Ringwalt has decided to surrender this tendency while also witnessing it struggle to charm the spirit out of breakthrough. We get a gorgeous call-and-response between the mundane and the sublime, practicality and the will to be drastic, desire and dissociation, the floor and the heavens, singers, and the swell of light that takes their songs under, to the subconscious, where this work does its bravest excavating.
- Harmony Holiday, author of Maafa
