Listening in Many Publics

Listening in Many Publics is motivated by the possibility of a future that is fulfilling, luminous, and held in common. The book expresses this vision in three long poems which are themselves composed of individual, interlinked poems. Using a circular structure that resists linear capitalist logics, fragmentation that attunes us to sound over sense, and a hybrid form that traverses both poetics and narrative, the poems speak to the necessity of articulating possible futures, of rehearsing different ways of being, and of returning to material truths, together. Plural, civic, and political, the poems locate themselves in the many publics that constitute our individual and social being, interrogate that which brings the subject into existence, and ultimately convey an open, hopeful sensibility in the face of the structures and systems they critique.

Jay Ritchie is a writer, editor, teacher, and McGill English PhD student. Author of the poetry collection Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books), a collection of short stories, and a poetry chapbook, he has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst and was the Assistant Editor for Metatron Press and Managing Editor of Vallum Magazine. Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing) is his latest book. Jay lives in Tio’tia:ke / Montreal.

“The thrust of the collection returns to a genuine grappling with the incoherencies of modern life…By turns disparaging and optimistic, Listening in Many Publics refuses an easy answer. Instead, it amounts to a survival tale—of trying to sustain oneself on nimble poetic disposition under the continuous and varied threats of exhaustion that come from both without and within.”—Montreal Review of Books

“Jay Ritchie’s poems veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie’s vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat.”—Ocean Vuong, author ofTime is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“In a slippery embrace with the inconclusive amid worldly, cosmic, and affective totalities, the circuitous beauty of this work plays off the peculiar resonances of possible, closing-in futures, and gathers what it can into the eminent now. Somewhere in the reach for the unreachable, these poems grasp the impossibility of it all. And invite readers to join the poet in letting it go.”—D. M. Bradford, author of Dream of No One but Myself

“‘What really happens, what we live, the rest, everything else, where is it? How to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?’ In his famous text, The Infra-Ordinary, Georges Perec asks us to write in order to question the usual. And it is on a journey of this kind that Jay Ritchie’s poetry embarks to leave us in an open landscape where time loses its linearity and the everyday becomes a music at times harmonious, at times dissonant, but always with the ability to be an open question that pierces us.”—Cecilia Pavón, author of A Hotel With My Name

Praise for Jay Ritchie:

“With their clever—but never glib—concision of image, and emotional directedness, these poems actually make me feel something, and that is something I really enjoy.”—Rebecca Wolff, author of One Morning

“Charming, funny, and often elegant. This is a formidable collection.”—Ben Fama, author of Fantasy

“Ritchie throws black holes on the wall, disappears through them. His poems are like dreams dreamed mid-movement, just before something happens, as if light, buildings, breath, parakeets, hope, haircuts, Montreal, and art-making are all fragments of the same epiphany.”—Sean Michaels, Giller Prize–winnning author of Us Conductors