In Max Ritvo’s debut book, Four Incarnations, images surface and break on the page like waves on the beach: sometimes clear and glimmering and sometimes disappearing before fully cresting. 

Facing Ewing’s Sarcoma and his looming mortality, Ritvo claims “no madness but the one of life.” Like many things in this book, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. 

But then again, it kind of does. . . and I vibe with it.

He titled his book Four Reincarnations because, as he told The New Republic, “reincarnation is sort of a defiant screw you to my cancer and death. If I can have four reincarnations I can have four hundred.”

In this collection we peer into just four of the reincarnations Ritvo experienced -  fractured through address to his friends, therapists, family, and cancer-spliced lab mice. These reincarnations we witness all occurred before Ritvo died at 26, so his themes reflect youth: Exes. Therapists. Mommy issues.

He’s a romantic too. In “Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid” - a moment for the title - Ritvo writes,

“You have my thoughts faster than I can. 

The mouth made from our lips

pours chilly water

out the pipe.”

Technically a millennial, he writes with the humor of a Gen-Z (this is a compliment). In “Stalking My Ex-Girlfriend in a Pasture” -  did I mention the titles? - he writes of the desire to “take back the hide she took / to be the sheet / on my eternal sickbed.” 

For me, the humor and precision of language current meaning past the literal.  If you can trade a bit of abstraction for some good humor, Four Reincarnations is a read for you. 

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