The Jack Ridl Visiting Writers Series is honored to welcome Jack Ridl and Chris Dombrowski ’98 on November 13, at 7 p.m., in the Bultman Student Center's Schaap Auditorium.

Jack Ridl’s new collection, All at Once, captures for us the surf-like oscillations of the past as it breaches our present tense. Ridl plumbs the past in order to follow the breadcrumbs to the depths of who he is, and to provide a key to the mystery of his survival. “One morning my therapist stared hard / into my eyes, then fiercely said, ‘You’re an orphan, // have always been an orphan,’” he writes, and it is that orphan-sorrow, for a “father’s lack of answers, [a] mother’s disinterest,” that pulses through and instigates these pages. The ballast is the present tense, which he writes with an elegant hand and witnessing eye. He reminds us of the comfort of hot coffee, a made bed, “the star-pricked sky with the uneven lantern light / of the moon,” the companionship of animals, and “butterbur spreading under the white pines.” Jack Ridl is a poet whose poetry has occupied his life’s center, attested to by the number of poems he dedicates to beloved writers, acknowledging the connective tissue, the communal web. “Galway! When did this happen?” he asks, addressing the now-missing. “Adrienne? Bill? / Charles? Etheridge, Nancy, Jane, Jerry, Lucille,” though as with Theodore Roethke, a profound life force comes surging back, “the anarchy of mud and seed / says not yet to the blood’s crawl.” I feel grateful for the “not yet” that gives us more work by this tradesman-poet, who continues to add something good to a world he was taught was not.—Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets

Ridl is Poet Laureate of Douglas, Michigan, and the author of Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press, 2019). His previous works have been awarded the National Gold Medal for Best Collection of Poetry by ForeWord Reviews and The Society of Midland Authors Best Book of Poetry award for 2006. Losing Season (CavanKerry Press, 2009) was named the best sports book of the year for 2009 by The Institute for International Sport. Then-Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected Jack’s Against Elegies for the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Award. Students at Hope College named him both their Outstanding Professor and their Favorite Professor, and in 1996 the Carnegie (CASE) Foundation named him Michigan Professor of the Year. More than 85 of Jack’s students have earned their MFA degree, and more than 100 are published, several of whom have received first book awards and other national honors. Every Thursday Jack posts on YouTube his vlog “The Sentimentalist.” 

When Chris Dombrowski burst onto the literary scene with Body of Water, the book was acclaimed as “a classic” (Jim Harrison) and its author compared with John McPhee. Dombrowski begins the highly anticipated The River You Touch with a question as timely as it is profound: “What does a meaningful, mindful, sustainable inhabitance on this small planet look like in the Anthropocene?”

He answers this fundamental question of our time initially by listening lovingly to rivers and the land they pulse through in his adopted home of Montana. Transplants from the post-industrial Midwest, he and his partner, Mary, assemble a life based precariously on her income as a schoolteacher, his as a poet and fly-fishing guide. Before long, their first child arrives, followed soon after by two more, all “free beings in whom flourishes an essential kind of knowing […], whose capacity for wonder may be the beacon by which we see ourselves through this dark epoch.” And around the young family circles a community of friends—river-rafting guides and conservationists, climbers and wildlife biologists—who seek to cultivate a way of living in place that moves beyond the mythologized West of appropriation and extraction.

Moving seamlessly from the quotidian—diapers, the mortgage, a threadbare bank account—to the metaphysical—time, memory, how to live a life of integrity—Dombrowski illuminates the experience of fatherhood with intimacy and grace. Spending time in wild places with their children, he learns that their youthful sense of wonder at the beauty and connectivity of the more-than-human world is not naivete to be shed, but rather wisdom most of us lose along the way—wisdom that is essential for the possibility of transformation.

Dombrowski is a 1998 graduate of Hope College and has also authored Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish as well as three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.