Max Ritvo’s The Final Voicemails (Milkweed Editions, 88 pp., published Sept. 2018) is actually two books: the first 41 pages are devoted to “The Final Voicemails,” a selection of 21 of Max Ritvo’s late poems, culled by Louise Gluck after his death at 25 from Ewing sarcoma, whereas the final 33 pages are given over to “Mammals,” a near-complete reproduction of Ritvo’s undergraduate thesis at Yale, where he studied poetry writing under Gluck. The poems in ‘The Final Voicemails” are far more powerful than those in “Mammals,” due to their emotional stakes being greater, although “Mammals” offers an interesting glimpse of alternate directions Ritvo’s trajectory might have taken if cancer had not first shadowed and at last curtailed his days.

Prior to picking up this volume, I had already read a great many of the poems that comprise “The Final Voicemails” proper, having scoured the websites of literary magazines for any trace of Ritvo I could find in the days immediately following his 2016 death. Being reunited with these poems, inhaling their familiarity, after all that time, felt like a real tangible gift, a quietly nourishing experience. Two years have passed since the world lost this poet, two years during which many things have happened and we remainers have lived and changed; at the end of that interval, for us to come back to these poems, or to have them rise forth to meet us in the form of a newly printed and bound book, can seem surreal, all the more so because the thoughts and images in the poems have the air of being as fresh and immediate as they did on the first encounter. As the readers, we are put in mind of Einstein’s train-cars, the thought experiment used to explain the theory of special relativity, and for a moment we cannot be sure whether we are on the train-car that was moving or the train-car that was stationary the whole time.

The passages I like best are pretty much the same ones I liked best two years ago. Of particular note, there are the stanzas about red berries at the end of the title poem, with all its deliciously unexpected turns (mimicking the turns of the tango the poem references two pages earlier): at first, the berries serve as a simile for the “mild passions” that distract or detract from self-knowledge, but out of nowhere they pivot to become the most real thing in the poem, the thing on which everything else hinges. Anticipating/preempting an imagined interjection from his reader (or interlocutor), the poet assumes an intimate directness, saying, “Don’t ask me to name [the berries] — / I’ve never been that kind of guy. / Red berries — sour, sticky. / If you really want to know, / come here, just try them.” The language is at once disarmingly casual (“guy”) and intoxicatingly soaked in romantic nostalgia (“I’ve never been” — three words that lay out upon the table the poet’s whole childhood, his entirety of past experiences, subtly contradicting the poem’s earlier assertion that self-knowledge had remained elusive: “All this time, I thought my shedding / would expose a core”). This passage about the berries exposes a kind of core, revealing the poet’s self-understanding that he is not “that kind of guy”: i.e., he does not see himself as the type of person who stands on ceremony with regard to the technical nomenclature for things; he prefers lived experiences, things that can be touched and tasted. The stanza’s last line (“come here, just taste them”) is simultaneously an alms-giving and a seduction, proffering fruit that, just seconds ago, were no more than one abstract arm of a simile but now, through verbal legerdemain, have flared to life.

That poem’s my very favorite, but there are plenty of nuggets of beautiful wisdom to be found here. Consider “Quiet Romance,” where the poet re-frames the encounter of man with death as a two-way street, the two parties equally afraid of one another: “I can hear already / a roaring in the distance, / half salt, half horse, // I like this, I’m scared, but / so’s the sound. We’ll both be guests.” From reciprocal fear, it’s only a short step to reciprocal esteem and hospitality: hearing Ritvo say it with his voice’s customary air of trustworthy authority, I am greatly tempted to believe it.

Or consider “Earthquake Country Before Final Chemotherapy,” where the poet, just by saying so, magically transforms himself into “the ghost in the bridge / willing the cars to join me, // telling them that death was not wind, / was not weight, // was not mist, / and certainly not the mountains — // that it was the breaking apart, / the replacement of who, when, how, and where / with what.” Death, in this portrayal, is a corruption of sentence structure, a flattening of grammar; does this mean poetry, with its three-dimensional — sometimes even four-dimensional — grammar, is the key to achieving anti-death? Reading these poems, I come close to being convinced it is.

I want to carry this book with me as a physical talisman for a while. I feel a wish to press it into the hands of all my fellow sarcoma doctors, if not all other readers. There are many layers here, ranging from the surface bodily descriptions of the cancer experience (the cachexia, the pain, the loss of appetite) to deeper layers of evocation, and if you don’t pick up on all the layers the first time, you can keep coming back for the others. This book will keep existing, and there is something we could all learn from keeping it close.

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018; 1st ed. pub. by Anchor & Plume, 2016), which won Second Place in the 2017 Elgin Awards. Her poetry, fiction, essays, book criticism, translations, and visual art appear in journals including AGNI Online, Bellevue Literary Review, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.