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FEATURED ON CBC'S FRESH AIR WITH DAVID COOPER
Funny while serious, wise without being certain, full of feeling and yet rinsed of sentimentality.
The characters in Ronna Bloom's new collection In a Riptide are tired, sick, old, fragile, baffled, worried, dying, dead, uncertain, snacking, happy, generous, preoccupied, horny, astonished, and sometimes free. Emily Dickinson and Bukowski show up in the same poem. The Buddha has a shower. And Sisyphus is released from his burdens. It's the hospital meets the circus. Here, humour, darkness, and ecstasy mingle, and the chaos doesn't stop. But there's breath in these poems. There’s life.
"Ronna Bloom wades into the dark waters of illness, old age, and death, swims out and returns bearing hope and humour. Here's a voice to trust in our present riptide."—Martha Baillie, author of There Is No Blue
"A marvel."—Souvankham Thammvongsa, author of Pick a Colour
"I think any reader of Canadian poetry will recognize the strengths of Bloom's enigmatic imagery and her intimate, personal voice in In A Riptide, and be both pulled into its undercurrents and swept out into its larger themes which is really all any poet can hope for."—Chris Banks, The Woodlot
"Bloom listens carefully and hears feelings that are the truth of another."—Michael Greenstein, The Seaboard Review
"This is a poet who knows the score: that the older we get, the more we know how little we know. That with age comes an autonomous self—along with the need to release the self."—Binoy Zuzarte, The Miramichi Reader
"What this collection offers, at the center of it all, is space to contemplate and reckon with a world that never stills and hardly slows."—Brittany Coy-Pinnock, The New Quarterly
Ronna Bloom is a Toronto-based poet and educator and the author of seven books of poetry. Her work has been broadcast on CBC, recorded by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind, and translated into Bangla and Chinese. Ronna is also someone who puts poetry to work in the world; she has led many initiatives to bring poetry into health care settings, specifically developing the first Poet-in-Residence program at Mount Sinai Hospital/Sinai Health. Ronna's most recent book is A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, September 2023). www.ronnabloom.com