Chasing Ghosts

M. Z. Ribalow is a poet, playwright and author. His novel Peanuts and Crackerjacks and his new playMasterpiece are 2011 publications, and his short fiction appeared in an anthology on Luck in 2010. His two dozen plays have received some 180 productions in a dozen countries; four have been published. His work has been anthologized and has won prizes in London, New York, and regionally. He is series editor of the Plays from New River volumes (McFarland Publications) and has also co-written ten childrens books and non-fiction books on sports, baseball and chess. He writes frequently on film, theatre, literature, music, and has appeared as a film historian on The Discovery Channel and on special feature documentaries of several DVD releases of classic films. He is Artistic Director and co-founder of New River Dramatists, which has for the last decade successfully developed hundreds of new plays and screenplays while discovering and nurturing gifted writers, and which also presents poetry, fiction and drama on the New River Radio Show on Art International Radio online. He lives in New York City, where he is currently full-time artist-in-residence at Fordham University.

Reviews

M. Z. Ribalow is a poet of real distinction. His work is precise, perceptive, and provocativein the best sense available to the mind and heart. I strongly recommend Chasing Ghosts. Discover it, and you will return to it again and again.
     N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize Laureate, author of Again the Far Morning

An intellectual who persists in the love of language, an aging lover who dates Dickinson but marries Millay, a poet who is a king of paradox, M. Z. Ribalow, in his Chasing Ghosts cannot escape blood in our bloody continuing era, but his poetry is inspiring. He is a first-rate poet who yearns for connection even as he is most at home with the separateness with which we are all afflicted. If you strive for the poetry which builds a rough unity and is about the flightiness of reality, you will be at home with Ribalows work.
     Andrew Glaze, SEBA Book of the Year Winner for Poetry, author of Reality Street and Someone Will Go On Owing

M. Z. Ribalow is a poet not of the thing itself, but of the things echoes, the thousand aftermaths of movies and conversations with God and midnight neurotic phone calls and ticking memories, the regret that becomes a salvation of sorts without ever ceasing to be regret, the quiet ache that is its own heartbeat. These poems are lyrical but never flowery, cool but not detached, suffused at every elegantly turned phrase by meaning, or the hunger for it.

     Glen Hirshberg, winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award, author of American Morons and The Book of Bunk