Sleep Bringer by Daniel Ruefman

Intimate and illuminating, Daniel Ruefman’s new collection engages compassionately with frailty and loss, conveying a generosity of spirit. In the title poem, a new father finds himself suspended between remembered childhood and parental joy, becoming the comforting giant he once saw in his father. Ruefman’s quietly observant voice shines in the gentle portrait “Arthur” and in “Canoeing Canaveral,” an engaging villanelle. At the heart of this collection are the haunting cadences of “There You Were” and “Broken,” which tenderly evoke the loss of Ruefman’s infant son. Several poems suggest a keen awareness of human failings: “Inbox Anger” and “Socrates Had It Right” brutally portray familial selfishness, while “Danforth House” and “White Noise” interrogate a national discourse that is “lulling us to sleep.”

–Jonna Gjevre, author of Requiem in La Paz

Ruefman’s Sleep Bringer poems are raggedly emotional, humane, and accessible. Simmered in a sophisticated poetic sauce, they still maintain a raw vulnerability. The powerful loves and losses of parenthood have taken him to some difficult and desperate existential places, and he, as “sleep bringer,” ponders how to keep his children safe in a dangerous world where newborns can die inexplicably. His disillusionment with society runs throughout the collection, and religion has become “stale” as old butterscotch candy, “embedded” with “grit that could not nourish and cellophane that could not save.”

–Sandra J. Lindow, author / editor of The Alchemy of Stars II