Praise for What Happened to the Inca Doves?, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation

What Happened to the Inca Doves? reveals a life through a mosaic of literary forms: prose poems, diary entries, epistles, fragments of dreams. Its seven sections work in concert toward a portrait, from childhood memories to the death of a lover to the desires of a man in his eighth decade. What remains consistent throughout is a steady, welcoming voice, trustworthy and brave in its eagerness to understand.

I have long been awed by Boyer Rickel’s art. In his magnificent new collection, he creates an alchemical mix of lyrically-charged prose, perfect musical pitch, and judicious narratives of love and loss. His poems brim with the largesse of his being. As after great pain, Rickel arrives at this inscrutable question: “If emotions embody judgments…, / what does a lack of feeling say? Or fury?” What Happened to the Inca Doves? is a stunning work by a poet commanding the full force of his talent. —Cynthia Hogue, author of instead, it is dark

Boyer Rickel’s What Happened to the Inca Doves? is a fascinating, moving account of how someone very alive experiences, freshly, life’s currents and rapids. Unguarded, consistently authentic, and deeply considered, Rickel’s lyrics range in form, defying and challenging genre; it is difficult to summarize how much he achieves. This is a stunning and memorable book that I will return to again and again. —John Levy, Shelley Memorial Award recipient

• Read “Last Things” from What Happened to the Inca Doves?

Praise for Tempo Rubato

Memory, time’s passage and speed, body, physicality, and grief are the themes of this collection of poems, Tempo Rubato, Italian for “stolen time.” The poems are a landscape, laid out with the minutiae of a life, of several lives; they wend, wind, circle through layers and layers of memory: mother, lover, father, self, all in bodies with frailties. Rickel skillfully alternates between small detail, moments of humor and profound honesty, and cutting lines that devastate out of nowhere; though after their arrival one realizes he has been building to them all along. And then he goes on. This cutting is not the end of the story, nor is it even, necessarily, the point. More the fabric of a life lived, and continuing to be lived, in our shared state of worry, uncertainty, joy, pleasure, and mourning. These are necessary poems, quietly and yet achingly aware: of loss, of joy, of the smallest details. —Arianne Zwartjes, author of Detailing Trauma: A Poetic Anatomy

Tempo Rubato is profound lamentation pressed throughout with eros and vitality. Here the body suffers, touches another body, holds the desiring self, the self acutely aware of its own necessary embodiment: clothed and unclothed, robust, aging, reaching, dying, returned to stillness. “It’s me! the smile proclaims.” Shot through with the “animism of particulars,” with eidola, or bodies returned enlivened, as in memory, as in dreams of the beloved deceased, each sentence vibrates with its own internal melody, both a stunning and unforgettable composition in grief and a riveting song in praise of life, each line a sequence of “multicolored blown-glass beads of sound along a thread.” Boyer Rickel has written a powerful and personal masterpiece. —Jason Zuzga, author of Heat Wake