RaveColumbia JournalRitvo refuses to wade with us in our fruitless investigation on life and its supposed meaning. Instead, he gives us poetry, so affirming, so beautiful, and so mortal ... grave topics are approached with a candid humor, as comforting to the reader as it is necessary ... As the poems unfold, we gain insight into Ritvo’s complex emotional state on his impending death ... we may find these lines darkly humorous but somehow profoundly tender, as if he too is a guest to his own emotional residue ... This dichotomy between the mind and the body relays itself as a dialogue in The Final Voicemails, adventurous and casual, like close friends in the midst of several ongoing conversations. Ritvo addresses these subjects with his patented wit ... Ritvo’s humor, though, is complemented, not undermined, by his palpable struggles ... Appeals to the afterlife, both for Ritvo and the world in which he occupied, are sparingly addressed. This is not a criticism of Ritvo’s work, as these considerations often plague last books. Ritvo’s audacity as a writer comes, in this case, when the future is relayed to his present ... Death haunts this book, sometimes explicitly, and always in relation to one another. In this way, the obligation to consider death in the abstract is placed squarely on the reader ... Simply put, The Final Voicemails is required reading for anyone with a curiosity into the material of death. Or, as Ritvo writes in the poem, \'Your Next Date Alone,\' \'The stage is empty./How do you fill it?/With music.\'