Remarkable, really, the way in The Kingdom Where Everybody Sings Off Key Helen Ruggieri moves from her life's early music when she was a teen angel with a Jersey Girl's desires, when in the dark of a car her angora sweater "electrified itself" as it slipped over her hair & when, somewhere, it was always 1955 with Little Richard & Elvis & doo-wop ? to, for example, the mature & spiritual reconciliations with the past that we hear in her penultimate poem in which she realizes "the larger rhythms rocking us" & embraces/makes a part of her being that "cepuscular kingdom / where no one keeps time." Yearning & yearning for the past subside, & the poet stands whole, in an off-key but deeply human twilight of poetry & deep understanding. This is a hard-earned, wonderful book. ~ William Heyen

The Kingdom Where Everybody Sings Off Key

Literature & Fiction

Ruggieri, Helen

Poetry

Aldrich Press

The poetess

Uroboros Books

The character for woman

Foothills Pub.

Poetry. This book is about loss—parents, lovers, friends, pets, all those whose absence is felt strongly. Loss is approached through myth, through despair, through sensory detail like the empty hollow in the bed, or from the viewpoint of the shoes abandoned in the closet. Twenty-five years ago Ruggieri wrote 'no one I love has ever died.' This book looks at what time does to us all. "Ruggieri, with an intense regard for right diction and informing imagery, looks at those things that come her way—both from books and from her rural river town of Olean, NY—and saves them for us, saves them from passing into oblivion, saves their enduring values. She is an explorer, a discoverer, who sees the large worth in otherwise small things."—John Balaban "Reading Helen Ruggieri's haunting meditations on the slow passing away of the things of this world, the 'dusk geology measures,' is like finding the lovely delicate bones of a creature you hadn't realized was long extinct. Again and again she reminds us to take note, to bear witness. Remember how beautiful it was to be here."—George Bilgere

The Kingdom Where No One Keeps Time

Mayapple Press

Blue Elegies: Poems

Sea Crow Press

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Books by Ruggieri, Helen