Ricky Ray – författare

"I set desire / on fire / and she screamed/ I couldn't tell / if the scream / was agony / or ecstasywhat's the difference?" - From 'What's Left' "and when we settle into our dens at night, we talk of you, as one might talk of a cupped hand, fading slowly, the rest of the body long departed: a rusty bucket, offering water-all that's left of a god. " - From 'Somewhere in Indiana' Ricky Ray entwines the beauty of the world and his love of life with the weight of physical pain he shoulders daily, in this stunning chapbook which urges you to find new meaning in nature's mysterious workings: "Every time I look up/ into a canopy, I see a mind at work." In The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself, Ricky Ray invokes the animalistic yet the utterly, undeniably humane. Visiting the most intimate corners of memory, this is a chapbook that promises linguistic prowess and the healing - however raw - of the ache of living. From Indiana, Florida, and Oklahoma to the inescapable moment of our own death, the moment the sun sinks below the horizon, the moment 'the cancer / bloomed like an angry / flower in her liver', Ray's language is masterful, transfixed on elevating the mundane and exposing every private moment of our existence. - Kayla Jenkins, Writer

Through visceral and vulnerable poetry, Ricky Ray meditates on the pain and gratitude that arise from a keenly felt awareness of our fleeting existence. Recognizing his humanity as a facet of natural processes, Ricky measures the ache of living in a disabled body against the joy of 'being lived' by the places he inhabits. As we accompany him and his soul dog, Addie, through the scenic woodlands of New England, the concrete jungle of Manhattan, and the swamps of the Deep South, the lines between humans, animals and nature begin to blur and move in concert.Shifting between forms both physical and elemental, we read of an existence lived not ‘upon / but as one’ with the Earth, 'whose being we are throughout and beyond our brief sojourn as human'. At the heart of this collection is the transformative experience of Ricky's life with an old brown dog, which teaches that soul isn't merely something we possess—it's an animacy deeply shared.