Reality Checkmate (Stahlecker Selections)

A dynamic and philosophical debut collection, Daniel Ruiz’s Reality Checkmate choreographs the endless wrestling match between lyrical sensibility and ontological principles taking place on the mind’s stage. These poems exquisitely demonstrate that phenomena in the material world are rarely as simple as they seem and yet must continually confront the universe’s countermove—the constraints of life itself, the knowledge that all we truly have is the present moment and the face value of our perceptions. He succinctly summarizes the history of art as cultural capital—“all of us are / eternally punished with proving / literature is about literature // after all”—while revealing the redundancies and blind spots of intellectualism—“Meanwhile, a lost sheep / finds grass to eat // anywhere it wants, / and does not mind, / like Lorca, letting its hair // grow long.” While Reality Checkmate delights in the cerebral mode, its celebration of relativity as well as the lush materiality of language yields equal imagery and musicality, upholding sensory experience and human relationships as existentially significant in the absence of absolute truths. In Ruiz’s astonishing first book, dawn is not morning—or rather, not merely morning. “Madrugada” rejects a navel-gazing discourse on sentimentality and the passage of days, commanding that “you for whom meaning / is the meaning of beauty, be gone.” We could spend our whole lives ideating a metaphysics of time and waste the wonder of sunlight right in front of us. “Meanwhile, / the clouds are proud of all of us. It’s 12:01. / A man dragged by a poodle says / Good morning. Everyone in the orchestra / stands up at once.”