Wrong Heaven Again, says the rabbit to the real estate. The poem won’t go away. You drive the car to work for an earth of its excrement. When the boss says “flexibility,” the grave keeps singing. The grave keeps singing, who built this city, that city? Who speaks for you when you speak? The latest apple ad says “let loose.” Okay. Light is a capital blown apart. No spoilers. You write your name down on the envelope and it disappears. We discuss thirst. We discuss our service to the revolving door. To the wound. We smile and pretend to compete with each other for a while. The sun cracks open the street, waves of old work now seething free of “the work.” And what are we, stepping out of this mouth, one dream after another.
Ryan Eckes is Brecht, probably, or better, deploying his poetry of crude thinking (plumpes denken) against the rancid confections of the present order. These poems tell the truth. – Anne Boyer
The poems in Wrong Heaven Again emerge from the deformation of language by landlords, administrators, and politicians who seek to dress up the daily hell into which we've been plunged. But rather than accept defeat, these poems play comically, often surreally, with the everyday cognitive dissonance of being asked to accept our inherently precarious conditions as inevitable. Ryan Eckes' fragmented, tough lyric mixes the quasi-bureaucratic jargon of corporate boardrooms with a latent desire for unalienated life, turning every last institutional euphemism in on itself to reveal the cry for freedom it labors to suppress. In these poems, collective life is violently configured and reconfigured, our bodies elastic as slapstick cartoons with each new economic disruption that comes down the pike, that promises "another gig, a gig, a gig, another gig." And yet underneath the exhaustion, there is the will for the world to be remade so that "tomorrow now exists / the arrow of time impales the right enemies, finally." – Laura Jaramillo
Reality is the only movie that keeps us awake at night, once wrote the Chilean poet Enrique Lihn, but when reality looks more like a dystopian movie, we can't afford to doze off, we must stay alert. Wrong Heaven Again by Ryan Eckes is the perfect pinch to that end: class-conscious poetry, sharp lines that tell it like it is. The frustration and exhaustion of the working class is summarized in powerful and lucid poems that denounce, letter by letter, the horrors of this individualistic and competitive capitalist system. In an ideal world, these poems would be mandatory reading in high school. Bertolt Brecht meets Roque Dalton meets Amiri Baraka. Poems will never make the revolution happen, it’s true, but a revolution without poems is no revolution at all. And the revolution I hope for has Ryan Eckes' poems as its soundtrack. - Carlos Soto Román