“Celebrated poet and professor Lawrence Raab’s tenth collection of poetry is one of mysterious and visionary sight, quiet music, and the unaffected stillness of reflection that is common to masterpieces capable of holding their potency for generations.” ―Marina Brown, Los Angeles Review “Every poem in April at the Ruins is a powerhouse: rich, quietly essential, profoundly lucid. Many have flavors of the best parables or folk tales, bringing us into intimate relation with mysteries and transformations abounding around and inside us…. Raab’s sense of irony is unerring. These poems prove that one of the only true forms of consolation is giving darkness its due.” ―Amy Gerstler “[T]his collection isn’t just nostalgic. Instead, it is full of wonder. Wonder and the ability to step through wonder into a whole new place.” ―Alexis David, Compulsive Reader Every poem in April at the Ruins is a powerhouse: rich, quietly essential, profoundly lucid. Many have flavors of the best parables or folk tales, bringing us into intimate relation with mysteries and transformations abounding around and inside us. The book’s title accurately encapsulates Raab’s role as negative capability ninja, evoking both spring’s beginnings and the flotsam and jetsam of endings. Opposite possibilities and alternative scenarios thrive side by side within the marvelous, snow-globe-like worlds of his poems: what did happen or what might have, the questionable nature of revelation, the slipperiness of the stories we tell ourselves, how we live suspended between death and utter loveliness. Raab’s sense of irony is unerring. These poems prove that one of the only true forms of consolation is giving darkness its due. --—Amy Gerstler In these poems Lawrence Raab confirms what his fans have known for years, that he curates the Museum of the World, an institution of the mind that will outlast all the brick and mortar ones. Everything is here, and in the right amount. Like the monks who light their candles even after all the monasteries close “because / they always had,” Raab comforts us, shapes our days, makes gifts of them. How grateful I am to have these poems in my life. --—David Kirby Lawrence Raab has long been one of American poetry’s most authentic, most perfectly modulated voices. Yet in these new poems, he boldly risks unguarded measures and urgent sounds. This is a book of summonings: into the dark wood; into the night music which might be, if memory proves to be something other than an abyss, the frontier of eternity. There are supernal tensions on every page here, and everywhere, just at the horizon, unprecedented daybreak. --—Donald Revell Lawrence Raab is the author of nine books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times . An earlier collection, What We Don't Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993) was a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His most recent book of poems is THE LIFE BESIDE THIS ONE (Tupelo 2017). He is also the co-author (with Stephen Dunn) of a chapbook of collaborative poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea . In 2016 Tupelo published his collected essays, WHY DON'T WE SAY WHAT WE MEAN? He is the Harry C. Payne Professor of Poetry Emeritus at Williams College, where he taught for forty-two years.