RaveThe Guardian (UK)Boxing has inspired some of the best sports writing, and we can now add American author Rita Bullwinkel’s debut novel to an expansive canon ... Bullwinkel’s writing is as poignant and visceral as the sport demands, her words inhabiting the thoughts and bodies of her characters.
Max Ritvo
RaveWorld Literature TodayThe late poems are primarily on the subject of the poet’s illness, and they creatively and movingly explore the way we are both distinct from and identical with our bodies, a theme that severe illness has a way of emphasizing but which is also a part of everyday human experience ... As serious as the subject matter is, these poems tend toward the whimsical, a sort of surrealist playfulness in the Ashbery/O’Hara vein ... Very few disciples of Ashbery have come so close to equaling the master’s ability to coax a sense of mythic import out of personal life, using only irony and apparent, though belied, flippancy. This trick serves Ritvo well in enabling the reader to empathize with rather than merely pity the dying man that speaks in these poems. This accomplishment is both an aesthetic and a moral achievement.
