Description:
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.
Review Quotes: John Rybicki collects the ordinary elements of a work day, whether it's work at the tire shop or work at the desk 'cracking one sharp stone against a page until it sheds/the proper sparks . . .' These are the fruits of hard labor and love, a poet banging away until the beams are balanced, until life is balanced for one day against all the confusion and swirling called a life. It is love, after all, that begs this testimony, but it is devotion that allows it to flower into song. --Sandra Cisneros, best-selling author of The House on Mango Street and Caramelo