At the heart of Joshua Rivkin's debut collection Suitor is a profound wrestling with desire, history, and the big questions of how we make and perform a self in the world. In conversation with the confessional tradition, Suitor begins with a sequence of poems about a mother's boyfriends and lovers, and how these relationships inform the speaker's own understanding about eros and masculinity. At the center of the book is a lyric essay, "The Haber Problem," that moves beyond the self and personal history to retell the story of the scientist Fritz Haber. Later sequences and poems reflect on the past with erotic directness, longing, and lyric intensity. With grace and honesty, the poems of Suitor ask what it means to be a suitor in the fullest sense-to follow, to pursue, to chase the inexplicable hunger at the heart of desire.

About the Author
Joshua Rivkin is the author of Chalk: The Art and Erasure of Cy Twombly, a New York Times Book Review editor's choice and finalist for 2019 PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography and the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing. His poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Slate, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Best New Poets. A former Fulbright Fellow in Rome, Italy, as well as a Stegner Fellow in poetry, he has received awards and scholarships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Rivkin lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Reviews

"Unbeknownst to us, we have been awaiting a book like Joshua Rivkin's Suitor, a book for our times, of such astonishing candor and wicked, sharp seeing into the inscrutable nature of maleness in our times. Driven by a probing intellect, the poems here, principled in song, at once heartbreakingly unveil and render complex our current crisis of manhood, whose only resolution lies in such tender, focused, and incisive language. Reading this book, I assure you, will broadly awaken you to your own journey or someone sitting next to you, and then, that person next to them." -Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep and Hoops

"For opulence of imagination and spareness of language, for musical savvy and analytical rigor, for a frankness that is both tender and unnerving in its nakedness, Joshua Rivkin's Suitor is one of the best books of poetry, let alone first books, that I've read in a very long time. His prose meditation about his father and the moral culpability of the scientist, his lyrics about sex as a blueprint of the psyche, and his nuanced understanding of how children and parents create the story under the story of our civilization, is mature, formally masterful, and refreshingly free of moralizing cant, blame, or the desire to shame. Best of all, for all its tough-minded skepticism, it's a book replete with an undeluded hopefulness." -Tom Sleigh, author of House of Fact, House of Ruin and The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees

"In Suitor, Joshua Rivkin's field of vision is lyrically sweeping, moving through a mother's series of boyfriends, to the pursuit of revisitations with a father known 'best by departures and arrivals,' to revisionist history, the speaker's own suitors-as well as the speaker as suitor, a word which comes 'from the Latin secutor, to follow.' Here is a tenderly quiet and rigorous study on human behavior in familial, historical, and domestic spaces-of the body, the house, of intimacy and legacy. Like a tinkerer with a delicate touch, Rivkin attempts to untangle the knots of a kite unspooled-'a kite / caught in a tree high above ground / and there's no way to bring it down / without breaking it or the branches.' Yet what is ruptured in these poems is also a site of connection: of rendering what is lost over time and regained in memory as a bridge between the self and the world around him; Rivkin's presence and awareness are tremendous gifts. He does not 'tal[k] around anything,' rather, he moves and bears witness across time, in and though bodies, tender moments of love, lust, and disappointment. The 'past is not forgotten' and the 'story doesn't change,' but Rivkin's sightline is always honest, seeking, and true. His is an astonishing debut." -Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost Of and Finalist for the National Book Award

"In this dreamlike, lifelike gem of a book, Joshua Rivkin opens us to our deepest humanity, which is to say our deepest desire and fallibility and want. Suitor is a book of so many selves, all wanting . . . what? Connection may be one word for it, but, it seems to me, the mystery of what we truly wish for is the beating heart and restless soul of this book. With critical rigor and rigorous heart, Joshua Rivkin holds the mirror to the whole burning trouble of what we're willing to do to call the thing we most want ours. Sometimes the answer is nothing. Sometimes the answer is burn the world down. This book is a secret and a marvel. I think it's what we mean by confession, if we're really honest with ourselves. Which, this book seems to remind us, we so rarely are." -Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic and The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart

"This strong debut rigorously and restlessly addresses human desire."-Publishers Weekly

"Rivkin's deft play with image, memory, and form provides readers a fascinating mode of meditation. The book is generous in its vision and openness, and strong in its assertion that all relationships are complex - whether they are with family, time, language, or knowing itself."-John Dudek, Kenyon Review

"An expansive rumination on the self, what it means to succeed those who came before you, as well as the pursuit of desire."-Cade Johnson, Zyzzyva

"Poetry is Joshua Rivkin's art, but he approaches it with the keen observational powers of a scientist."-Geoff Wichert, 15 Bytes

"We are all, in this pandemic, a living elegy; there are loves, possibilities, selves, ways of life that are dead, a mobile mortality poets have always known and used their art to reckon with, fool around with, and renovate: enter ghosts, memories, and Wordsworthian "spots of time." Enter Joshua Rivkin's abashedly self-conscious and evocative, capacious yet taut lyricism, which constructs desire as the cornerstone of autobiographical poetry. Restlessness may well be the character motivation or backstory underlying the experiences that give rise to poetic expression; it is also the subject matter underlying artistic representations of family and sexual histories." -Hannah Baker Saltmarsh, The Georgia Review

Book Information
ISBN 9781597098588
Author Joshua Rivkin
Format Paperback
Page Count 88
Imprint Red Hen Press
Publisher Red Hen Press