The landscape of Ritual and Bit is littered with the speaker’s past: empty 40s, old posters, family lies, and fragmented missives. Internal struggles play out in the detritus of long-ago. Yet even as the speaker attempts to cautiously map his movements, effect a survival, and navigate beyond his past, he faces emotional fissures wrought by the present. Throughout the book, he restlessly searches for ways to regain control of his life, partly through ceremonies, prayers, and devotions, and partly through lyrical force. The danger is palpable among wolves and claws, boxcutter and jackknife. There’s both caution here and a willingness to abandon caution if anything or anyone could be reached. The poems ask, What makes a home? What should we expect when we are so determined to live in a world where everything is disappearing?

Ritual and Bit

Literature & Fiction

Ostrom, Robert

Poetry

AmazonUs/INDPB

Poetry. "Here is some sorcery, not necessarily explicable. Here is the invisible; Robert Ostrom traffics in it. The poems of THE YOUNGEST BUTCHER IN ILLIONOIS are some of the most gifted I've ever read. 'We are not safe,' he writes—but nor would we ever, for a moment (here) want to be. There's something oddly shy about the way these poems comport themselves, but the imagination is brazen with yearning. The authority of craft is bracing: the lines are sutured but there are no scars. The dark, passionate, miniature universe Ostrom has composed is seductive and whimsical. This is a new voice—edgy, stricken with attentiveness, soft-spoken, numinous. Take him at his word."—Lucie Brock-Broido

The Youngest Butcher in Illinois

YesYes Books

SANDHOUR, the follow-up to Rob Ostrom’s award-winning first book, Ritual and Bit, offers a brave and intimate look at the interiors of family, home, place, trauma, and childhood. With gravitas and deep concentration, the poems of SANDHOUR startle and shine. Highly artful in their approach to syntax, these vivid and crushing poems stand out (as Ostrom’s poems often do) for their ability to distill and rearrange the traditional lyric meditation. Occasionally, there are poets so original that they chart a course for us as readers, inventing for us (seemingly in real time) the forms that best reveal the larger mythologies at work. SANDHOUR is unlike anything you will read this year.

Sandhour

Saturnalia

The Bear Wrestler

Saturnalia Books

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