David
Ricchiute
Author of a story collection and two poetry collections.
Collections
“These are sly, surprising, and powerful stories that deliver big emotional wallops. In a collection focused on secrecy, the reader acts as a literary detective, uncovering psychological truths and savoring Ricchiute's delight in storytelling.”
— Valerie Sayers, author of The Age of Infidelity and Other Stories
“No 'Tragedy of the Broken Teacup' here! An instant and telling Neo-Naturalistic classic, David Ricchiute’s Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret smashes whole cabinets of chipped porcelain souls. These stories are flawless performances of enduring literary 'flaws,' fatally flawed crumbs ground down into the carpet, syncopated and backbeat disruptions and disturbances that reanimate the grand indifferent smacks and hard knocks from the likes of Crane, Dreiser, Steinbeck, and London. No, not teacups but the seriously chipped and cracked human human hearts beatdown by teed up interesting disinterests, whole sinks sunk by ditched dishes and crazed crockery. No bluffing here. No polite pinkie fingers. A very different table setting. Read ‘em and weep.”
— Michael Martone, author of Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana and The Complete Writings of Art Smith, The Bird Boy of Fort Wayne
“‘Longing,’ we’re told in David Ricchiute’s Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret, engenders ‘reckless behavior,’ and, indeed, one of the many pleasures of reading this poignant and lyrical story collection is witnessing that force at work as the boys and sons and husbands and fathers and divorced and single men glimpsed in these pages seek (and often fail) to quell an unnamed but pervasive yearning. By turns mysterious, melancholic, and deeply moving, Ricchiute’s book reaches into life’s many and varied rooms—in hospitals and homes, schools and churches, hotels and libraries—to expose and penetrate humanity, in all its complexity, its marvels and regrets, miscommunications and betrayals. Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret is a work of haunting beauty by an exciting and perceptive writer.”
— Leah McCormack, author of Fugitive Daydreams
“In Keeping What’s Best Left Kept Secret, David Ricchiute’s rich, enigmatic collection of short stories, truth is whispered if told at all and sorrows are unnamed but deeply felt. His lonely characters navigate life in a series of misbegotten yet compelling efforts to connect with others, returning again and again to moments in childhood and adolescence that might explain why the fundamentals of adulthood remain mysteriously unattainable to them.”
— Barbara Shoup, author of A Commotion in the Hear
“Set in the same former mill town and spanning many eras, David Ricchiute's collection of closely observed, elegantly wrought stories exposes secrets people keep from their community, their families, and themselves. From lies about embezzlement to generations of broken promises over Native lands, from hidden indignities of the polio epidemic to more modern scourges of mill-town-aftermath pollution, Ricchiute's insightful stories draw energy from the clash of truth and nostalgia while probing the corroding effects of carrying guilt and secrets.”
— Jody Hobbs Hesler, author of Without You Here and What Makes You Think You're Supposed to Feel Better
“Thank you, David Ricchiute, for this beautifully-crafted, heartbreaking account of polio victims in the 1950s, many of whom suffered from a return of the condition (post-polio) many years later. We also feel the pain of parents who saw their child go from playful to imprisoned in an iron lung – some of those poems express the horror so well that they are a little difficult to read. Elegant, sophisticated, at times powerfully sparse, this is a gem of a collection that will tug at your gut, evoke admiration (and envy) for the writer’s skill, and teach you history.”
— Robin Stratton, author of Some Have Gone and Some Remain
“As we go about our lives as best we can in the current pandemic, David Ricchiute’s Uncertain in the Worst Way reminds us that there have been murderous precursors in this country. In a well-researched cycle of tightly wound emotional poems set to a cadenced iambic meter, Ricchiute captures the uncertainty, the fear and frustration of children and their parents during the polio epidemic in the early 1950s. This is a powerful book.”
— Jeff Worley, Kentucky Poet Laureate, author of Lucky Talk
“Uncertain in the Worst Way tackles the theme of polio in the best way. David Ricchiute first introduces us to 'A Boy Near a Creek' and 'A Girl in Her Room.' Then through the untypical medium of poetry, he documents the disease including Post-Polio Syndrome, a condition afflicting polio survivors years after recovery. From FDR and Salk to children in rows of iron lungs, Ricchiute delivers a wide-ranging poetic documentary of an uncertain epidemic.”
— Barry Harris, editor, Tipton Poetry Journal, author of Something at the Center
“'[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