In his first book, Four Reincarnations, the speaker’s voice is somewhat tentative and the metaphors riotously elevated ... in The Final Voicemails Max’s words engage with doubt and certainty in a manner that goes well beyond mere knowledge. They convey the sort of wild and strange imagery that so many contemporary poets strive to achieve, but in these poems, there is no room for hyperbole. Max has created a sort of meta-metaphor, images that are both metaphor and simultaneously mean exactly what they say. These poems offer a surreal, in- and out-of-body candor that, at times, can be devastating to read ... Max achieves that rare conflation of desolation and exultation that may only be possible when facing death. He personifies objects, vilifies loved ones, compartmentalizes body parts, projects his emotions, shape-shifts at will, and creates characters that may or may not exist, but are humanly and inhumanly real to him, and through him, to us ... Max’s tenderness for those he is leaving behind is abundantly voiced; his playfulness and self-deprecation are brightly alive. He possesses an inner strength that blends disaster and joy in the same cup ... Max left us a legacy of wisdom in poetic reflections few have surpassed.

Ritvo 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.'

The term 'voice mail' modernizes a classic understanding of lyric poetry, similar to the way Dickinson’s sense of her poems as unprompted 'letters to the world' did. Like a voice mail, a poem is a performance that anticipates a response, shaped for a specific but absent audience: by the time it reaches its recipients, the author will have moved on. But, after death, it can be 'played back' on an infinite loop, a material but fragile manifestation of voice. It is short, because we know the tape runs out ... These poems envision countless afterlives, each one more arresting than the last ... These poems envision countless afterlives, each one more arresting than the last ... Ritvo is now permanently located, and obliquely revealed, in his poems. It’s we, his readers, who come and go. When we close [this book], we miss him.

The 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.

This second collection, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Glück, again offers his distinctive voice—partly insouciant, partly penetratingly smart—imparting an immediate sense of what it's like to die as he effectively reminds us what it's like to live ... Ritvo is generous to take us along on his final journey, and along the way, as he shows us a bare tree, a blue-eyed crow, the joy of moving, how stars sometimes don't join in constellations on a dark, wet night, he's making us see, really see ... Highly recommended.

The result [of his final work] reflects Ritvo’s astonishing linguistic agility, singular vision, and thought processes as well as his frankness, quirkiness, and sly humor. It also reveals the potent way he embraced life, despite recurrent cancer and numerous surgeries, clinical trials, and debilitating treatments. Feeling an urgency to make art, Ritvo was prolific; he was also wise and gifted, and he seemed emotionally mature beyond his years ... The Final Voicemails may conclude Ritvo’s literary legacy, but it will stand as a testament to the salvation that is poetry, how it lives beyond the page and the poet.

Glück has sifted through the work Ritvo left behind—finished and unfinished alike—to arrange a collection that displays the breathtaking talent and effortlessly surprising shifts ... And it is perhaps because these poems have not been through the usual revision cycles that they feel so pressing and otherworldly ... These poems are raw and immediate, unflinching musings on the nature of the body, spirit, illness, and death: 'When my heart stops, it will be the end of certain things,/ but not the end of things itself.'

In this collection, raw meditations on death are not documentation of suffering that serve only to extract a sort of charitable sympathy from the reader. Ritvo was able to get outside of himself, somehow, and to keep an eye on how all of this would be narrativized ... Ritvo manages not only to escape himself, but he holds a mirror to the rest of us ... I do believe that the collection’s relative bareness, its sort of skeletal authenticity is fitting. Ultimately, it might make The Final Voicemails a more effective piece of art; after all, you’re only allotted so much time to leave a voicemail before you’re cut off.

...in these pages he still welcomes us into his home furnished with pain, loneliness, and joy all abound with his signature wry humor and transcendent hope ... In The Final Voicemails, Max Ritvo, 'carrying the words, / shaking with tears,' sings with a language of love and generously invites us into the hospitable shelter he designed for himself.