Jay Ritchie

 Invisible Publishing, 2024

Listening In Many Publics

Finalist for the 2024 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry from the Quebec Writers’ Federation

“[P]oems that make me feel like I’m standing on the sidewalk waiting for a streetcar, surrounded by concrete and straining to hear a birdsong. It’s somehow brutalist and lonely and collectivist and hopeful at the same time.” — The Juncture

“The thrust of the collection returns to a genuine grappling with the incoherencies of modern life…By turns disparaging and optimistic, Listening in Many Publics refuses an easy answer. Instead, it amounts to a survival tale—of trying to sustain oneself on nimble poetic disposition under the continuous and varied threats of exhaustion that come from both without and within.” — Montreal Review of Books

“Jay Ritchie’s poems veer and dare new forms to think and feel in. From sonnets to open, more diaristic armatures, Ritchie’s vexed interiority scans an ever rich and deeply felt ontology that emerges from a backdrop of wit, wonder, and hopeful bewilderment before the social world and its disarmingly absurd repercussions on language. A sure-footed, mighty feat.” — Ocean Vuong, author of Time Is a Mother and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

“In a slippery embrace with the inconclusive amid worldly, cosmic, and affective totalities, the circuitous beauty of this work plays off the peculiar resonances of possible, closing-in futures, and gathers what it can into the eminent now. Somewhere in the reach for the unreachable, these poems grasp the impossibility of it all. And invite readers to join the poet in letting it go.” – D. M. Bradford, author of Bottom Rail on Top and Dream of No One But Myself

“‘What really happens, what we live, the rest, everything else, where is it? How to account for it, how to question it, how to describe it?’ In his famous text ‘The Infra-Ordinary’ Georges Perec asks us to write in order to question the usual. And it is on a journey of this kind that Jay Ritchie’s poetry embarks us to leave us in an open landscape where time loses its linearity and the everyday becomes a music at times harmonious, at times dissonant but always with the ability to be an open question that pierces us.” – Cecilia Pavón, author of Little Joy and A Hotel With My Name

coach House Books, 2017

Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie

“With their clever – but never glib – concision of image, and emotional directedness, these poems actually make me feel something, and that is something I really enjoy.” — Rebecca Wolff, author of One Morning— and founder of Fence Books

“Charming, funny, and often elegant. This is a formidable collection.” — Ben Fama, author of Fantasy

“Ritchie throws black holes on the wall, disappears through them. His poems are like dreams dreamed mid-movement, just before something happens, as if light, buildings, breath, parakeets, hope, haircuts, Montreal, and art-making are all fragments of the same epiphany.” — Sean Michaels, Giller Prize-winnning author of Us Conductors

“Jay Ritchie’s snapshot of life under late capitalism is uplifting.“ – Natalia Yanchak, The Dears

Reviews by: Arc Poetry, Canadian Literature, Today’s Book of Poetry, CultMTL, rob mclennan’s blog

Insomniac press, 2014

Something You Were, Might Have Been, or Have Come to Represent

“I would be tempted to describe Jay Winston Ritchie as ‘a promising young Canadian writer,’ except I also think of him as an old soul in a younger body, someone who already possesses a vast level of wisdom. The stories in this debut collection feel, to me, like a ripple of sadness in a cosmic ocean of compassion and quiet wit.”
– Guillaume Morissette, author of New Tab

“This is a debut collection to stop and take real notice of – a highly original new voice.” 
– Mireille Silcoff, author of Chez L’arabe

“Ritchie’s elegant and precise renderings of the hilarity and despair of art scenes is so spot on as to completely defamiliarize. All the best writing does this.” 
– Monica McClure, author of Tender Data

Reviews by: Weird Canada, Broken Pencil