John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.
Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.

We Bed Down into Water: Poems (Triquarterly Books)

Literature & Fiction

Rybicki, John

Poetry

TriQuarterly

John Rybicki offers up an unafraid set of poems in this charged book of verse. We Bed Down Into Water is rich with imagery of family, love, illness, death, and, indeed, water, which seeps in throughout the pages: rivers, pools, rain, and tears. His moving stories, in both prose and verse, struggle to hang on to a vision of the world that can still allow benevolence, luck, and laughter. In this, the collection embodies a contradiction: it is a tender book of fury, a book of bleak hopefulness.Rybicki’s work is steeped in challenge: the biological and spiritual challenge posed by his beloved’s recurrent cancer or the daily challenges of an adopted child who could be, all too easily, lost. He spins these phenomenal struggles into a lyrical book that offers hope and awakens the reader into a new way of seeing.

We Bed Down into Water: Poems

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.

Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Press Poetry Series)

New Issues Poetry and Prose

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.

Traveling at High Speeds: Poems (New Issues Press Poetry Series)

New Issues Press

At the age of twenty-nine, just five years after they met, John Rybicki’s wife, the poet Julie Moulds, was diagnosed with cancer. Here, in poems raw and graceful, authentic and wise, Rybicki pays homage to the brave love they shared during her sixteen-year battle and praises the caregivers―nurses and doctors and friends―who helped them throughout. He invites the reader to bear witness to not only the chemotherapy, the many remissions, and the bone marrow transplants, but also the adoption of the couple’s son, the lifted prayers, borrowed time, and lovers’ last touches. A husband smashes an ice-cream cone against his forehead to make his wife laugh. He awakes in the middle of the night to find their dog drowsing atop a pile of her remnant clothes. 
The lamentations and celebrations of When All the World Is Old create a living testament to an endless love. Braided with intimate entries from Moulds’s journal, these poems become the unflinching and lyric autobiography of a man hurtling himself headlong into the fire and emerging, somehow, to offer us a portrait of light and grace. 
Rybicki’s hymns rest in the knowledge that even though all of our love stories one day come to an end, we must honor the loving anyway. The poet has dipped his pen in despair, but as he cleaves his heart and our own, he transmits the exquisite pain of loss into a beauty so fierce and scalding and ultimately healing that the reader comes out whole on the other side.

When All the World Is Old

Lookout Books

Yellow-Haired Girl With Spider

March Street Pr

Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Poetry & Prose)

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