still by Corey Ruzicano

 

As the title of this chapbook suggests, these poems sit equally inside movement and time, investigating both the banal and transformative moments of being that aggregate towards a life. Still is a work full of wonder and imagination: there is a poem in which the speaker imagines freezing to death as an extended metaphor for gendered violence, leading the reader through the chill and stupor, then the fighting back. Reading Ruzicano’s poems—which engage the eye through their shifting visual forms as well as the ear—I had the feeling I was walking through the landscape of memory, learning the landmarks, names of plants, and weather patterns along the way.

–Claudia Rankine

 

Corey’s ability to use language to describe the world around her is unmatched. Her collections of poems take you on a journey through her life. In a subtle yet loud way, you find yourself asking questions about how to navigate one’s life. How to take the journey of finding yourself through every perspective. The thing I appreciate the most is the room to grow, Corey is not giving us an end all be all, she’s giving us an open-ended story.  This has us clinging to her every poem in search of something, that Corey herself is still searching for.

–Fanta Ballo, Mentee and Friend

 

A poem is both the world evoked by its words, and its words. It’s both inviting and cryptic – a secret we’re let in on, but never fully. Corey’s writing feels like this – grand unwieldy emotions are captured perfectly, while simple daily details remain elusive.

 

I love the searching she does. I love that ‘still’, that the titular premise, is not still as in inertia, but rather its opposite – the way we say ‘still…’ and posit just one more thought. And then another. And then another. As though we are heading – doggedly, valiantly – toward an answer.

 

Corey is. And maybe she has found it – but that’s her business. I love her searching. And wrapped in her rich eloquent language, her pictures, her attempts at prayer, her good loves, her troubled ones, her road trips, her severed fingers, her melancholy, her joy, her looking back, and forward, and deep into grand echoey canyons, we willingly travel with her.

 

‘you can see the foot in front of you

and

when you drive in to it

you will see the foot in front of that

and that is enough’

–Fin Kruckemeyer, author of The Boy at the Edge of Everything

 

In a deceptively quiet voice, Corey Ruzicano’s debut collection amplifies questions about how to live in complex times and how to locate oneself from the perspective of daughter, sister, friend, citizen; that as the poet investigates her relationships with the natural world, with family, and herself, the questions inform the interrogation with care and love. Her poems are both tender and lyrical, resounding and thoughtful. The result is a gifted writer’s appraisal that to live is to live with uncertainty and wanting, a voice to relish and trust.

–P Carl, author of Becoming a Man the Story of a Transition