Lamenting While Doing Laps In The Lake

LAMENTING WHILE DOING LAPS IN THE LAKE by BILL RATNER, is a poetry book of humor, elegy, childhood adventure, and adult insight. A book of remembering, forgetting, reinventing, and re-mythologizing the world with a brilght lightness of heart, blended with the detail of fine china and the honesty of a condemned man, or a toddler with an outrageous command of language, detail, and style. Nine time MOTH StorySLAM champion as well as, Grief Counselor in the State of California, Bill Ratner, gives us this finely-crafted poetry, to go along with his previous collections TO DECORATE A CASKET, from Finishing Line Press and FEAR OF FISH from Alien Buddah Press. Lamenting While Doing Laps in the Lake offers us two aspects of poet Bill Ratner. Part 1, "Youth," is a memoir in fragments, recalling a boy's upstanding Midwestern family who, one by one, die. The poems remain faithful to the child's perspective as he strives to make sense of these losses. In part 2, "Age," Ratner observes the world of his adulthood, weaving the sublime, the ridiculous, and the unpredicted into a thrill ride that unhinges logic and leaves us with an expanded sense of possibilities. - Terry Wolverton, Poet, Author of Ruin Porn