EMERGENCY BRAKE
Tavern Books, 2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection
(sold out its 1,750 book print run)
Tavern Books, 2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection
(sold out its 1,750 book print run)
Praise for Emergency Brake:
#2 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, February 2016
#2 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, March 2016
#8 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, April 2016
#10 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, July 2016
#8 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, October 2016
#24 bestselling book of the last several years, Small Press Distribution
"Ruth Madievsky's first collection is an announcement like a bomb going off, like a super wave coming to swallow us up! For my part I am thrilled to be taken away by such energetic, funny, and heartbreaking work. This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."
Matthew Dickman
"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."
David St. John
"Emergency Brake announces a vital voice and vision, the first gasp of something special. Bracing yet raucous, vicious yet whimsical, the collection is an ode to the precariousness of being and the potential in becoming."
Prairie Schooner
"...it's the best new collection I've read in a long time. These poems will break your heart, make you laugh, turn you on, stain your teeth, open all the windows inside you..."
Staff pick, Green Apple Books on the Park bookstore
"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"
ZYZZYVA
"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."
Columbia Journal
"Madievsky is a careful and purposeful poet, whose use of humor only adds to the strength of this collection...Every poem in this collection, dear reader, is worth your time, every question raised herein worth your consideration, because you live in the world of this speaker, a world that is being reconstructed by a distinct and powerful voice."
Waxwing
"...she orchestrates dramatic and sometimes violently sensual relations between the real and the so-called surreal—as if these two modes are acquaintances intent on intoxicating one another."
Boston Review
"Two amazing things are happening in Emergency Brake, and they happen to be just what I need in a poetry collection: metaphors that leap and dazzle, guided from cover to cover by spoonfuls of narrative...Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, “Do it again! Do it again!”
Harpur Palate
"Each metaphor she uses is clear-cut and simple, yet beautifully worded in a way so as to make me want to slap myself for not thinking of it first...The cycles that the speaker goes through in these poems, in healing, in obsessing, in connecting everyday situations to her abuse, feels honest and real...Madievsky does such a wonderful job of matching words to feelings that many survivors will be able to relate to and understand."
Poetry City, USA
10 Small Press Books You Should Read
Literary Hub
#2 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, March 2016
#8 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, April 2016
#10 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, July 2016
#8 on Small Press Distribution's Poetry Bestsellers List, October 2016
#24 bestselling book of the last several years, Small Press Distribution
"Ruth Madievsky's first collection is an announcement like a bomb going off, like a super wave coming to swallow us up! For my part I am thrilled to be taken away by such energetic, funny, and heartbreaking work. This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."
Matthew Dickman
"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."
David St. John
"Emergency Brake announces a vital voice and vision, the first gasp of something special. Bracing yet raucous, vicious yet whimsical, the collection is an ode to the precariousness of being and the potential in becoming."
Prairie Schooner
"...it's the best new collection I've read in a long time. These poems will break your heart, make you laugh, turn you on, stain your teeth, open all the windows inside you..."
Staff pick, Green Apple Books on the Park bookstore
"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"
ZYZZYVA
"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."
Columbia Journal
"Madievsky is a careful and purposeful poet, whose use of humor only adds to the strength of this collection...Every poem in this collection, dear reader, is worth your time, every question raised herein worth your consideration, because you live in the world of this speaker, a world that is being reconstructed by a distinct and powerful voice."
Waxwing
"...she orchestrates dramatic and sometimes violently sensual relations between the real and the so-called surreal—as if these two modes are acquaintances intent on intoxicating one another."
Boston Review
"Two amazing things are happening in Emergency Brake, and they happen to be just what I need in a poetry collection: metaphors that leap and dazzle, guided from cover to cover by spoonfuls of narrative...Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, “Do it again! Do it again!”
Harpur Palate
"Each metaphor she uses is clear-cut and simple, yet beautifully worded in a way so as to make me want to slap myself for not thinking of it first...The cycles that the speaker goes through in these poems, in healing, in obsessing, in connecting everyday situations to her abuse, feels honest and real...Madievsky does such a wonderful job of matching words to feelings that many survivors will be able to relate to and understand."
Poetry City, USA
10 Small Press Books You Should Read
Literary Hub