ABOUT RICOCHET SCRIPT

​Alexandra van de Kamp’s Ricochet Script examines life as a plot slipping from our hands, veering in unexpected directions as years coalesce behind us. These poems bargain with time as a foreign, surreal, and elusive entity, where whole days can feel as if they were “written/in someone else’s script.” In vivid, at times playful musings, van de Kamp grapples with midlife, loss, and the strangeness of the body, while never forgetting the unrelenting beauty of being alive. These poems invoke a wide range of storylines, from Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and spy thrillers to aging parents, to confront the unpredictable and ricocheting world.

Alexandra van de Kamp tells us “I want to make sense of abundance.” In her beautifully wrought poems, we experience the sheer delight of all the sights, smells, and sounds of this world. Yet few poets are as deft at simultaneously evoking the precarity and consequent tenderness of existence. Van de Kamp’s is a world made magical through art. She is canny, funny, filmic, but she can also stop your heart with the sudden apprehension of how time moves through us, “coaxing us / to bear something so much larger than ourselves.” Ricochet Script is the book we need in these challenging times, a book that quite simply teaches us how to live more fully.
–Sheila Black, co-editor of Beauty is a Verb, author of Iron Ardent

This poet is a lithe acrobat, her ricocheting thoughts tightly woven by stunning images. The poems think, yet the movement is concrete, specific, tuned with details: “. . . watch the bright / balled-up leaves in the boiled water unfurl and float, / like mini-Ester Williams doing the backstroke.” Or “. . . let’s not forget the invisible; / the mosquito the size of a torn // eyelash . . .” The poems in Ricochet Script decry and bless the human condition. Alexandra van de Kamp’s use of irony, pathos to describe inner and outer worlds, and her close investigation of mortality brings us a book to savor, to read slowly, expectations raised to the excitement and beauty of what is next.
–Veronica Golos, author of GIRL

In the atmospheric Ricochet Script, poems are rendered not only in the high contrast of film noir, but in the flesh tones of unmediated raw material—the body and the life gathered around it. The powerful “Elegy to My Uterus with a Glass of Pinot Noir” blends the cinematic and the body effortlessly in its opening lines: “When they told me you had to go, / I envisioned myself on a train in a 1950s European war film, staring out / at a country I’d never see again.” Throughout Ricochet Script, Alexandra van de Kamp takes delight in the tools of her trade. Language shimmers with meaning and eroticism, words themselves become “rounded and ridged morsels.” While the mood sometimes darkens, the voice of these entrancing poems remains sophisticated, ardent, witty, and passionate.
–Stephanie Dickinson, author of Blue Swan Black Swan: The Trakl Diaries