Ruth Bavetta's Blog

I'm slow in telling you about this book, which was published a few years ago. The poems in it circle around my mother, as I watched her disappear into the loss of who she was.

Bavetta does what few poets can manage. She writes about her mother without getting maudlin or wallowing in the pain of her death. She does so by using her artist’s eye to let us see for ourselves. We then relate her poems to losses of our own. She also brings her poet’s ear to the task. Pantoums and villanelles, with their repeated lines, are perfect for describing rerun conversations and the sameness of days in dementia. Instead of weighing us down with loss, she lifts us, showing us what it means to be human.

—Alarie Tennille

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/No-Longer-at-t...

I’m getting excited. My latest book is almost ready to come out from FutureCycle Press. Diane Kistner is a joy to work with and I think this is one of the best designs she’s done. Not to mention all the fine-tooth editing. And I’m thrilled with the cover photo. It’s a stunner by Tom Daley, with whom I once took an ekphrastic class.

If you haunt the halls of Facebook, you can go like the Futurecycle Press Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/futurecycle.... you’ll not only get a notification when my book comes out, but also reminders about current Free Kindle Saturdays. My book will eventually be one of those, too.

Here’s the official description:

Ruth Bavetta gathers us around the table to partake of the meal of living. She serves a piquant simmer of togetherness that tastes of love, loss and remembrance. This is food as more than recipes and restaurant reviews. We partake of the ragout of ritual and celebration, help ourselves from the platters of tr and culture. We are nourished with the joys and sorrows of life, find succor in the soup of sex, sensuality, and pleasure.

I’ve just received my contributor’s copy of Chiron Review. I had work published there years ago, when it was a newsprint publication. It’s now been reincarnated as a handsome perfect bound journal. (Also available in Kindle format.) Proud to have my poem Asphalt Dreams included, a poem I wrote when wanderlust hit me and I longed to just keep on driving east on the 10. Because it’s print I can’t direct you to the poem online, but here’s Chiron Review’s website. http://www.chironreview.com/

The new issue of Red Paint Hill is up and running. It's a good-looking publication, including original art to accompany each poem. I’m delighted that two of my poems are included. Dinner is Served goes crazy in the kitchen. Ducks is just for fun. Both poems are from my as yet unpublished manuscript, Flour, Water, Salt.

Dinner is Served http://www.redpainthill.com/#!issue-7...
Ducks http://www.redpainthill.com/#!issue-7...

Dead in a Ditch! That got your attention?

The new issue of IthacaLit has two of my poems, Dead in a Ditch and Traveling. I wrote Dead in a Ditch recently for Flour, Water, Salt, my in-progress book of food-related poems. Traveling is from quite a few years ago, during my bout with cancer. You can read them here: http://ithacalit.com/ruth-bavetta.htm...

See me, hear me! Last year Kentucky Review published my poems, A Song on the End, The Joy of Cooking and Elegy for My Mother. Now they've added videos of me reading them. http://kentuckyreview.org/index.php/i...
Scroll down a bit, click on the name of the poem, and then poke the arrow to wake me up.

Here's one of my visual poetry pieces, The Making of History, an amalgam of image and word. Thanks to Rattle for posting this on Facebook. Do click on the image and then click on the next image. That way you can see what the piece really looks like, and read a bit about it.
https://www.facebook.com/rbavetta/pos... Claesz

Silver Birch Press has published my poem, Red Silk Heart in their “Me as a Child” series. You can read it here: https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.co... True story. What can that guy have been thinking? He was only 13, too. I’ll bet his mother put him up to it. I was totally embarrassed.

Fox Adoption Magazine has published my poem, How to Get to My House. You can read it here: http://foxadoptionmag.org/poetry/how-...

Petrichor Machine - A literary magazine for people who love words. Their latest edition is now out, and it includes my poem, Full Circle. The is a print publication so you can’t read it online, but here’s a link to the journal: http://www.petrichormachine.com/

Petrichor: {PET-ri-kuhr} The distinct and pleasant smell of rain on previously dry earth.
Machine: {muh-SHEEN} A mechanical apparatus or contrivance, consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions

That’s it for now.
Cheers,
Ruth

Sometimes the only way to find out if an online pub has put up your work. If Ilya's Honey ever sent me a notice that these had gone live, I didn't find it.

The first is about a lot of the stuff I knocked myself out doing when I was younger. The second about my dismal attempts to become bilingual.

Shinnying up my Life http://www.illyashoney.com/A55656/ih....

I Love You, Where Are You, Let’s Go to Bed
http://www.illyashoney.com/A55656/ih....

Sometimes the only way to find out if an online pub has put up your work is to google it. If Ilya's Honey ever sent me a notice that these had gone live, I didn't find it.

The first is about a lot of the stuff I knocked myself out doing when I was younger. The second about my dismal attempts to become bilingual.

Shinnying up my Life http://www.illyashoney.com/A55656/ih....

I Love You, Where Are You, Let’s Go to Bed
http://www.illyashoney.com/A55656/ih....

Previously published in North American Review, this poem is also in my book, Embers on the Stairs'

Ode to the Toothpick

Not really tan, more like ecru,
fawn, tawny beige, presented
unshellacked and oddly

mismatched in a lidded box.
Shavings of thin veneer stamped
in clean tapered Bauhaus lines.

Singly they have no aroma,
but place your nose
to the small blue cardboard casket

and breathe the birch woods of Maine,
white-skinned, under a sky
of Botticelli blue.

For January, FutureCycle Press is giving away a free copy of my book, Fugitive Pigments. This book draws extensively on my background as a practicing artist. There are ekphrastic poems, instructive poems, poems riffing off the principles of art—the art of living, of shading, perspective, colors; how to create an exquisite corpse, and what one should know about shadows.

Enter here to win:
https://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/en...

Blue Heron Review is proud to share the news that we have nominated your poem, "Expendables," from the June/2014 Blue Heron Speaks feature for the 2014 Best of the Net Anthology."

This is a journal that leans towards the "spiritual" in poetry. They contacted me last spring and asked me to be a featured poet. I have never written anything intentionally spiritual in my life, but I sifted through my culch pile of poems and came up with several that could work that way.

Of course, nomination does not guarantee inclusion in the anthology. I have to wait to find out if my work will be chosen. Here's the poem she nominated:

Expendables

Give them your heart, liver, lungs,
the network of nerves, the strum
of your breath. Let them deconstruct
the architecture of your bones,
pile them on the hill in an ossuary
of discontent. Let them pull
and release the sinews,
tug apart the tendons,
pluck the feathers.
They will not find
the mystery.

August 15, 2014

I’m thrilled to be reading in Redlands on Aug 22. It’ll be fun to be back in my old home town. Over 30 years I lived there. I’d be thrilled to see some of my friends from that area. Dying to see who turns up. It’s a group reading, but Maureen Alsop and I will be reading the longest. Friday, Aug 22, 5-7 pm, at Greater Good Coffee, 300 E. State St., Redlands, CA.


The online publication, Barely South, has my poem Packing My Grandmother’s Suitcase. I wrote it one day when I was thinking about her and all the things she loved. You can read it on page 42 at http://issuu.com/barelysouth/docs/bar...

The Wisconsin Review has accepted my poem, Since My Father Died, My Mother and I Often Discuss the Best Way for Her to Kill Herself. It’s a print publication.

And last, but not least, Splitting the Genre: An Intersection of Poetry and Art is a beautiful little book by Six Arrow Press. I’m pleased to have four of my pieces included. My MFA is in Painting, I spent many years as an exhibiting artist, and teaching art at the college level. In these hybrid pieces I combine my two loves, poetry and art. The idea is built on the poetry of “erasure,” eliminating words from a piece of prose to expose the poem within. There’s also a nice interview.

You can see the entire book online here: http://www.blurb.com/books/5377678-sp... My stuff is on pages 13-21.