Traveling at High Speeds: Poems

Review ...'Some nights my body takes/ the shape of this city' [Rybicki] commences, and like all places called home, the body and the city are inhabited with huge ambivalence. There are comforts and danger there, loves and disasters, the urban biology of decay and renewal, energy and release...But here the reader is trusted with the insights and answers. Rybicki is the test driver, not the tour guide. In 'Traveling at High Speeds' we are left with the sense that the writer knows, if not exactly where he's going, exactly how to get there. -- Thomas Lynch, Detroit Free Press, December 1, 1996John Rybicki ignites the page. His vital, urgent poems celebrate pleasures some would call-- mistakenly--small. Or, as in 'Asthma,' brilliant metaphor underscores the visceral fear of being trapped in one's own body. I have copied out lines from his poems and kept them on my desk for years; I needed them close by. -- Amy HempelThe kinetic energy of John Rybicki's poems is his unmistakable signature. His poem, 'Traveling at High Speeds' opens with the lines, 'Some nights my body takes the shape of this city.' That urban shape is the shape of John Rybicki's poetry as well. The city in question is, of course, Detroit, but whether Detroit itself is the subject--as it is in many of his poems--or not, the cadence of its streets informs the slashing attack of Rybicki's vivid language. John Rybicki is the kind of poet whose individual poems seem like autobiographical fragments still hurtling apart from some personal Big Bang. His roots are working-class and he's worked with juvenile delinquents, emotionally impaired children, mentally impaired adults; he's worked on farms, run a historic grist mill, and tutored in prison. These experiences collide like charged particles in his poems, and yet one senses behind the bursts of fragmentation a unity of perception and deeply considered emotion. -- Stuart Dybek Product description Poetry. The kinetic energy of John Rybicki's poems is his unmistakable signature.His poem "Traveling at High Speeds" opens with the lines, "Some night my body takes the shape of this city." That urban shape is the shape of John Rybicki's poetry as well. The city in question is, of course, Detroit, but whether Detroit itself is the subject, as it is in many of his poems, or not, the cadence of its streets informs the slashing attack of Rybicki's vivid language. From the Publisher Perhaps the most intriguing book of poems to come out of Detroit since Phillip Levine and Jim Daniels. Hard-nosed city poems matched with lyrical country poems. Poems of work, love, family, struggle against illness. Funny, tender, full of poignant longing. About the Author John Rybicki was born and raised in Detroit. He has since lived and worked on farms in southwestern Michigan near the small towns of Vicksburg, Grand Junction, and Richland. His poems have appeared extensively in The Quartlerly, Poetry East, New York Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly, and Calaban. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Foreword: What I most admire about John Rybicki's work is the incandescence--the indefatigable incandescence--of the emotions carried in his poems. Stuff's always catching on fire or whirling away. What else is art but an engagement with the senses? Rybicki knows that our bodies are not candles but bonfires--little piss-ant ones, to be sure, but bonfires nonetheless--and whether you live to be a hundred, or blink out at 35, you have to burn while you still can. While the great unwashed rest of us take breathers and smolder or sometimes do not even burn at all, Rybicki's narrators open their mouths to say Nice morning and fountains of sparks tumble out instead. I'm glad there's someone in the world who goes through life this way. I'm also glad it's not me--I like being an old lazy-butt and thinking pastoral, pastoral while Rybicki-pen flames and hurls himself at the world--hurling his pen at anything