LAMENTING While Doing Laps In the Lake
Superbly crafted storytelling by a 9x MOTH StorySLAM champ. Bill Ratner’ stories are poems of humor, elegy, childhood adventure, and deep adult insight. A book of remembering, forgetting, reinventing, and re-mythologizing the world with a bright lightness of heart, blended with the delicate detail of fine China, and the cold truth-telling of a rambunctious toddler or finally, repentant man.
Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake offers us two aspects of poet Bill Ratner. Part 1, “Youth,” is a memoir in fragments, recalling a boy’s upstanding Midwestern family who, one by one, die. The poems remain faithful to the child’s perspective as he strives to make sense of these losses. In part 2, “Age,” Ratner observes the world of his adulthood, weaving the sublime, the ridiculous, and the unpredicted into a thrill ride that unhinges logic and leaves us with an expanded sense of possibilities. — Terry Wolverton, Ruin Porn
Superbly crafted storytelling by a 9x MOTH StorySLAM champ. Bill Ratner’ stories are poems of humor, elegy, childhood adventure, and deep adult insight. A book of remembering, forgetting, reinventing, and re-mythologizing the world with a bright lightness of heart, blended with the delicate detail of fine China, and the cold truth-telling of a rambunctious toddler or finally, repentant man.
Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake offers us two aspects of poet Bill Ratner. Part 1, “Youth,” is a memoir in fragments, recalling a boy’s upstanding Midwestern family who, one by one, die. The poems remain faithful to the child’s perspective as he strives to make sense of these losses. In part 2, “Age,” Ratner observes the world of his adulthood, weaving the sublime, the ridiculous, and the unpredicted into a thrill ride that unhinges logic and leaves us with an expanded sense of possibilities. — Terry Wolverton, Ruin Porn
Superbly crafted storytelling by a 9x MOTH StorySLAM champ. Bill Ratner’ stories are poems of humor, elegy, childhood adventure, and deep adult insight. A book of remembering, forgetting, reinventing, and re-mythologizing the world with a bright lightness of heart, blended with the delicate detail of fine China, and the cold truth-telling of a rambunctious toddler or finally, repentant man.
Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake offers us two aspects of poet Bill Ratner. Part 1, “Youth,” is a memoir in fragments, recalling a boy’s upstanding Midwestern family who, one by one, die. The poems remain faithful to the child’s perspective as he strives to make sense of these losses. In part 2, “Age,” Ratner observes the world of his adulthood, weaving the sublime, the ridiculous, and the unpredicted into a thrill ride that unhinges logic and leaves us with an expanded sense of possibilities. — Terry Wolverton, Ruin Porn