Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Content Warning: animal and human death, murder, loss, grief
The sinews, bones, and musculature of Kris Ringman’s astonishing debut poetry collection cannot be underestimated or overstated. It would likewise be a disservice to describe the poet’s interventions into and explorations of sensuality, seas and their accompanying havoc and promise, and all manner of animals’ lives and deaths—particularly foxes—as merely deep or inventive.
While the poet’s ambidextrous, fingerful expressions articulate as well as metaphorize American Sign Language, the holes, guts, and bloodstreams of these poems evoke and render shapes all their own through images ranging from postmortem ligatures to embedded orgasms. In the in-between of the poems’ dreamy service roads lies an accessible pathway simultaneously full of gravel, water, and heat. There are many landscapes and yet they sail together, separated and removed then reinscribed and resuscitated.
In “Yearning,” for example, the poet asserts, “I would rather touch, close my eyes, open / my hands so they may enclose you. This heat. in my hands is a gift—” In the third of three sections in “That Precarious Edge,” we find one of many memorable lines, so familiar yet new: “The problem with having lived in several countries / is everything follows you home.”
Inverting and defamiliarizing, the poems critique and undermine the audism that so often accompanies the dominance and arrogance of hearing presumptiveness. As dearly departed animals’ innards are examined with compassion in these poems, so too are the words often making the world strategically inside-out and capsized, a counter to ableism both externalized and internalized.
Friendship, the moon, and murder occupy Sail Skin’s celebrations of curiosity and passion as well as its mournings of devastation and loss. In “When I Am Dead, Will You Make Runes With My Body?” the title alone is a stunner. Yes, it may be true that “You can feel safe in any hemlock grove” (section 4 of “When I Am Dead…”), but more importantly, perhaps, is the promise that after death, “I will make my ghost hands move” (section 5). For Ringman, skin can be “white wooden” (in “Sometimes I Pretend I Am You”), dogs surely manifest energetically (repeatedly), and ongoing, dispersed visits to India are as complicated as they are aiming to avoid appropriation.
I concur with Alice B. Fogel, who says of Ringman’s poems, “we’re given these potential shipwrecks of hope without sentimentality, through the lens of a still-unquenchable desire for a life large, up close, and intimate.” Read these poems with care and time—and, if possible, with a big dog. Or a red fox.
Title: Sail Skin
Author: Kris Ringman
Publisher: Handtype Press
Year: 2022
Back to Top of Page | Back to Book Reviews | Back to Volume 18, Issue 1 – Summer 2024
About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.