Poets' Choice Publishing Presents Elisavietta Ritchie's Twentieth Collection

Poets' Choice Publishing is pleased to present Elisavietta Ritchie's twentieth collection, "Babushka's Beads: A Geography of Genes," new & selected poems. Paperback 120 Pages $18.95 ISBN 978-0-9909257-74

"Elisavietta Ritchie's rich autobiographical collection of poems leaves you wanting more. Here is a woman who has really lived. This verbal rumination on her heritage, people she loved, family recipes for borscht and cherry vodka, the suffering of her aunt and thousands of others during Russia's Civil War and the Siege of Leningrad, are filled with such exquisite, well-realized detail, a reader is drawn along with the force of a rip tide on a summer afternoon at the beach. It's all simply so interesting. And her conversations with the past and recently dead intrigue us...Here are poems that extol life, sing of its joy, despite the cruelty and entropy that threaten at every turn. Ritchie, whose work is widely published, translated, anthologized and has won a number of awards, is a person you would want to know, some of whose poetry you have here, life seen through her bright, intelligent, compassionate eyes, what poetry does at its best, give heart." -From the Foreword by Richard Harteis, director, The William Meredith Foundation, Poets' Choice Publishing

"Elisavietta Ritchie's work is original, varied and exciting. The core of her poems is vitality. Grim, joyous, exuberant or erotic, they have a strong and vivid life."
-Josephine Jacobsen, US Poet Laureate, 1971-73

"Elisavietta Ritchie's poetry combines a Byzantine elegance with straight-forward plain style honesty. The extraordinary range of her interests: work, love, sensuality, and man's plight in a forlorn civilization - is reinforced by her exquisite regard for language and lively fascination with the possibilities of form."
-William Packard, late editor New York Quarterly

"Elisavietta Ritchie's Cormorant Beyond the Compost burns with eroticism and life. Reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and final hiss...Whether looking through the scrim into death, or looking back at her own family, I imagine Ritchie to be some mad cheerleader for passion, stealing blackberries, loving a dying friend, or recuperating from a bad mushroom trip, all the while refusing to give up, to be satiated...Life and death. Passion and its opposite, her touchstones...give her voice power; after all "like fire,/when we no longer burn, we die."
- Scott Whitaker, The Broadkill Review, National Book Critics Circle

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