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Remarkable actress and dazzling poet Beth Ruscio knows both the many masks we wear and those singular performances we each live to give. In SPEAKING PARTS, her powerful and deeply moving new collection of poems, we become the audience to the self and its many faces, some public and some familial, some romantic, yet some hidden until, at last, they are suddenly revealed. The elegant enactments and lyrical mediations of Speaking Parts remind us that to speak for others also allows us to speak most eloquently for those many interior aspects of ourselves. In this inventive and precisely staged book of poetry, those disparate voices braid together into a single luminous choir.
-David St. John, author of THE AURORAS
Buoying us fearlessly through theatrical make-up sessions, costume changes, death, love, and itchy wigs, the luminous poems in Beth Ruscio’s debut collection SPEAKING PARTS speak to us in a language that’s inviting, insightful, and alive. Even while acknowledging that ‘sorrow bleaches us, ’ and observing that there’s a ‘grammar of danger in the color if ice, ’ these poems somehow always uplift. Confident and poised, they own the stage of these pages. I am on my feet, applauding them and their maker.
-Gail Wronsky, author of IMPERFECT PASTORALS
Reading SPEAKING PARTS, I’m reminded of Marlon Brando’s response to the praise lavished on his (arguably spectacular) acting skills: ‘Everybody acts, ’ he’d shrug. Precisely! In Beth Ruscio’s ingenious, turn-on-a-dime poems, performance is all. There is no ‘true’ self for her speaker to uncover, and no canned epiphanies for readers, either. There are only the unsparing imperatives of improvisation-timing, cunning, abandon, ruse. Each moment’s desire met and then deflected. What does it take to play our/selves? Everything.
-Dorothy Barresi, author of WHAT WE DID WHILE WE MADE MORE GUNS
