So Everyone Else Will Know

“[W]here no part of waiting/ is more like it is/ before the telling happens,” the poems in David Ricchiute’s powerful and transformative collection, So Everyone Else Will Know, arrive in an exquisite state of tension. Part pilgrimage, part odyssey, these poems deliver us to and through a landscape of relationships shaped by the pressure of action on introspection and introspection on action, of memory on history and history on memory, of object on experience and experience on object. “Space is there because/ something else isn’t./ /Maybe this is where/ time goes—in between.” Uncompromising in their quest and in their questioning, unrelenting both in pursuit of discovery and in acknowledgement of the unknowable, Ricchiute’s poems are grounded in their own awakening: “The way space settles/ at the edges of things,/ forming shapes out of/ what’s not around them.”

—Lisa Bourbeau, author of Cuttings from the Garden of Little Fears

“Whatever you turn away from/ turns out in time to own you,” writes David Ricchiute in his impressive first book of poems. So Everyone Else Will Know conveys in language intensely intimate, that echoes like a bell, the inner paralysis incurred by keeping painful recognition from others and oneself. Breaking stasis by facing secrets from the past brings the grace felt in the turning, spooling of Ricchiute’s evocative lines, the free pirouette of a leaf claiming its grief.”

—Shari Wagner, Indiana Poet Laureate, author of The Harmonist at Nightfall: Poems of Indiana

“The quiet poems of So Everyone Else Will Know describe the ever-so-quiet catastrophe of living. Sometimes through nature’s registers—a wind in the trees—more often through the susurrations of a nearer but never quite interior human voice we hear in Ricchiute’s work the “versions [of ourselves] to come/ only later.” I would call these poems portraits, but of selves whose clothes never quite fit, who inhabit the “hollow/ where words don’t happen,” who live not in time but slightly to its side. I would call these poems witnesses, but of a future where nothing watches over us, where love will not find us, where no one is even waiting for us. So Everyone Else Will Know is a strange and beautiful book because it asks us to remember in equal measure what we can and cannot know about each other as well as ourselves, and because it persuades us of the continued value of living in a mystery that will not be dispelled even by a new form of grace.”

—Marta Werner, co-author of Emily Dickinson: The Gorgeous Nothings