Divorce Comedy
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DIVORCE COMEDY
by Ronnie Ferguson
Ronnie
Ferguson's latest book in the Selfies
series is a powerful meditation on a fissuring family in the industrial
heartland. Each inventive poem offers a penetrating vision into the depths of a
formative event, creating a poignant mosaic. As with previous installments—When I Was a Fire and A Good Fight is Hard to Find—Divorce Comedy weaves the terrifying
with the tender, the humorous with the harrowing, the concrete and accessible
with the ineffable. It's all there from the spotlight-clarity of the title to
the last line's curtain call.
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Ronnie
Ferguson’s poems are honest and gritty, willing to confront the tensions and
violence that mar so many human relationships. Yet rather than surrender to
rage, they extend grace and forgiveness. The poems are serious yet accessible, imaginative yet grounded, realistic without being ordinary. Read them once and
you will feel compelled to read them again, and again.
Lynn Domina, author of Inland Sea
In
twelve poems whose masterful rhetoric runs down the page with surprise and
grace, Ronnie Ferguson relives, with unflinching honesty, events spanning from
rocky early days to manhood. One of three children to troubled parents with
health issues, his upsets and losses remind us that the blueprint for home is
drawn in early childhood; from then on, it is a place we carry within us no
matter where we go. The poet says as much in “Father’s Day, 2017,” when he
tells his dead father, “i hear your wild laugh wherever we roam as though the
past ripples alongside the present.” Yet, these parents, because imperfect,
magnify the author’s compassion and humanity. In this work, Ronnie Ferguson
journeys from broken things to cohesion and forgiveness. Love remains long
after we’ve stopped reading.
Beverly Matherne, Poet Laureate
of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula