Rickey Laurentiis

"Rickey Laurentiis is a magician who can slow down time. Their poems are heady and sensual: their virtuosic work draws upon myth and canonical poetics to make something pioneering. They are dexterous with form, always finding the music to match their lines. From sinuous lyricism to urgent declamation, their work traces the complex relationships among power, freedom, and violence. You find yourself moving your lips as you read these poems; their sounds make beautiful and awful shapes."

                 — the 2018 Whiting Selection Committee

"I don't believe that the impulse to empathize (to mourn  with, to try to see as, to connect to) is wrong. Of course not. There have been several essays recently "against empathy," and they offer important, necessary correctives to how we handle collective outrage and mourning. But still, I won't take their message as being that empathy is false and impossible. Instead, they make me think, as does Laurentiis' poem, that empathy needs to be re-defined, re-conceived: that it is not necessarily the sharing of affect, but is, in itself, an ambivalent one. Empathy is not linear but, rather, the space that becomes present and palpable between the desire for our intimacy and the awakening to our distance."

                 — Mia You, Move from that distance to intimacy

Apprehending the black at the center of the painting, a black purple and equating it with a dying cow, tongue, sex, violence, death and the inability to erase oneself or not be party to what one has been forced to become, to witness, to know. Rickey’s poem forces you through itself, all shuddering. If it were to make an action it would be pinchy, how if you were trying to contain something live and writhing within your two fingers, the forefinger and the thumb, perhaps or your two hands, probably you would fail. The size of the subject, the opening, the player who was trying as in a nightmare to accomplish some agonizing task would simply become the very living measurement himself of this impossibility. The sound would be a series of squirms, the music of a very violent act. And this becomes beauty in Rickey’s hands."

               — Eileen Myles, for HARRIET

"The fear surrounding the events at Ferguson and elsewhere, the sense of vulnerability, the apparent meaninglessness of the black body, the particular conundrum I feel in being stranded as a body—half black, half white—in a kind of no-man's-land where it's difficult to gauge at any moment the difference between acceptance and tolerance, the degree to which acceptance comes only because my body doesn't pose, to some, as black a threat as another's: it's impossible for me to avoid feeling all of this, incorporating it into my sensibility, not just as a poet, but as a human being. The margins that I write from are maybe more recognizably grounded in sexual queerness than in race. But there is no racelessness in this world. I hope that I speak to any person whose outsiderness keeps leaving them somehow grappling. I hope my poems are a kind of grappling that they can relate to, a way of showing that we're together in this. Your poems do the same, I believe." 

               — Carl Phillips, in conversation with Rickey Laurentiis

"Between us, over text I mean, it might be enough to critique, to take down, to name the things we do not want to do. In public, this feels haughty. Easy. It is actually an easy public position to take. That’s what I have come to hate about FB. Harder yet would be to create, to put positively what we want of literature, of the public, of the political, thereby offering ourselves as the things to be destroyed. And its not fear that prevents me from doing this as much as fluency… What is the argument to be made? I will try: I say “soft soapboxing” over text. Here, I don’t want to point to what I don’t want to do or what is done wrong as much as I want to name and enact what I want, what I believe the “soft soapboxing” might prevent or get in the way of — vision, rigor, risk, sustained inquiry, sustained agitation, proactive rather than reactive thought."

                 — Solmaz Sharif, in conversation with Rickey Laurentiis

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