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SELECTED REVIEWS FOR The Fathers We Find (for the chapter "Holy Water") “Few authors capture the narrative voice with the perfect balance of self-deprecating humor and poignant insight that Charles Ries brings to THE FATHERS WE FIND. Ries' account of a small-town farm boy set against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War combines humor and heart to create a truly remarkable novel. The narrator stumbles his way to enlightenment with help from a series of delightful men in a journey that is hilarious and nostalgic.” “As promised, I read your book on this last trip. Read it in two nights, very late nights. That should tell you how much I liked it. You're an incredibly good writer. I don't, however, think it's a novel; it's a memoir and an excellent one. Maybe your saying "A Novel From Memory" really means memoir? Also, memoirs are supposed to be really hot now in the publishing field, so why not take advantage of the timing? I think this book is every bit as good as the James Herriott (English veterinarian) best-selling books, which are fabulous. I can actually see yours as a movie.” “Holy Water is a breath of fresh air! Mary and I would like to publish it in our Samhain Holidays issue (this Autumn). We love the piece, and just couldn’t reject it, though it doesn’t speak to any one of the holidays of that season. It does, however, speak of family and love, and maybe that’s the whole point of all holidays. In any case, you’re in with “Holy Water”, and we are pleased to showcase it. Mary and I look forward to reading the entire novel, and hope that you will let us know when it comes available. I have just finished reading Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, and find your work complimentary to his as found there.” “Charles Ries’ story of his youth and family life is full of colorful characters, evocative details, episodes both harrowing and humorous, and subtle wisdom. Every family – every life – should have a chronicler as honest, clear-eyed, and loving as Charles Ries.” “THE FATHERS WE FIND is just wonderful. A book can do so many things. It takes you where you’ve never been, exposes you to worlds you haven’t experienced and makes you aware you are not along in this journey. Your novel does all that. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. “THE FATHERS WE FIND is funny, fearless and fast. This spirited Life With Father reverie spins love, pain, and coming-of-age with skill and wit. Bookmark your heart: the sequel, SEEKERS, is now in progress.” “I recently received a copy of THE FATHERS WE FIND from my sister. After I finished reading this beautifully written story, I couldn’t help comparing its style to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days. Like Keiller, Ries gives us wonderful insight into small-town American life . . . and a beautiful understanding of why we are who we are. I look forward to reading SEEKER with great anticipation “I finally found time to read your memoir. It's real, it's wonderful, it's funny, it's heartbreaking. It's what Hemingway called "the true gen". I can't believe that it isn't already published and winning awards and accolades.” NOTE: Chapters from THE FATHERS WE FIND have appeared in Word Riot, Muses Kiss, SNReview, Write On!/Just Stories, Iconoclast, Thunder Sandwich, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, Romantics Quarterly and The Wisconsin River Valley Review.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR Christopher Robin LAURA STAMPS At first, ODD appeared to be a strange title for this exceptionally well-written collection of 28 poems. And the surreal cover illustration seemed more peculiar: a shirtless man with angel wings covering his ears, shadowed by a demon, and struggling to carry a huge head on his back spilling forth a lifetime of worries. But upon finishing this chapbook, I agree the title ODD and the excellent illustration by Gabriel Ries are indeed perfect choices. ODD is actually a saga highlighting the plight of a spiritual pilgrim, a poet whose approach to life is too mentally and emotionally complicated to achieve his goal: spiritual happiness. Unfortunately, the spiritual path requires simplicity. Thus, his dilemma. From the first poem to the last, we follow this complicated man through the maze of his life, encountering bums, bag ladies, barrooms, Spanish beauties, love lost, singles mixers, his first divorce, his second divorce, and a fish named Mike. Only Ries could expertly handle such a perplexing character, a complex man who sincerely seeks the happiness and joy of the spiritual life, yet fails to realize simplicity is the key to attainment. "I like to disappear into my head where it / doesn’t cost too much to be alone. I see a horizon / in the distance lying between the vistas / of my temples – spreading from my left ear / to my right ear. // In here I astro project, read people thoughts / and see the future. In here I bring the dead back / to life and turn my tears to snowflakes. // It’s a vast cine plex between my ears. A world teeming / with perfect lovers and sleeping demons. A theater in / the round where I view my life against the movie screen / God attached to the backside of my eyeballs." Even though his goal continues to elude him, he manages to gather quite a few spiritual jewels along the way: "Our thoughts are like dancers, two / inter-mingled, co-existing electrons / spinning around the same nucleus. // I wonder if wishing sets thoughts in motion, / causing invisible ripples in the unseen? / Ripples that carry our secrets to God?" (POETS NOVA) "Maybe stars are the souls of the glimmering dead, or perhaps meteors are / the tear drops of souls soon to be returned. Souls like me who dread their / plunge back into life’s unpredictable sea. " (STARS SUSPENDED FROM BRANCHES) "Once I was a blade of grass and the breeze passed / above me and rubbed against me, bending me. "Such / freedom," I thought. "To be a breeze. To soar high above / and close to the ground, to be rootless in air." // Once I was a human, I had complex thoughts and confusions. / I yearned for wealth and love and power and good looks. / All this yearning tired me and gave me migraine headaches. / Headaches so vast and out of control they robbed my sleep / and made me vomit. And as I lay on my couch, half in, / half out of awareness, from the sleeping pills and pain killers, / I remembered myself as a blade of grass turning my side to / the sun and my tongue to the rain and my roots to China, / and I ached to be simply green again." (ONCE AGAIN) "And through seasons and / doubts and changes of fashion / they discover their relationship, / unearthing a heart painted in a / bold brush stroke and the message, / it has been better to love." (VALENTINE) But in the end revelation strikes, and the poet realizes spiritual joy can only be found in simplicity, which Ries expresses beautifully in the Taoist-like title poem ODD: "They can’t hear it. / They don’t listen to leaves / in the moon light. The mystical / whisper of branches rubbing. // Funny what happens to a life / when the trees start talking to you. / When you hear the voices of your / garden." Is the road to spiritual joy really that simple? That odd? Yes, it is. This is a finely crafted collection of poetry, one that leads the reader through the bewildering ocean of anxiety and melancholy many face during the course of their lives and relationships to the land of hope and light. What a delightful twist that the poet should find this spiritual paradise waiting for him in his own backyard. Ries is not only a talented poet, but also an engaging storyteller, and ODD is the perfect collection for anyone seeking refuge from a world that grows more complicated by the hour. ******************** PHIL WAGNER ODD is a good title for this collection, whose poems note not only the strangeness of the world, its creatures, moments, and paradox – but that here we are, perhaps the only organism capable of being conscious of how odd life is. An odd thing consciousness: it’s where identity (and morality) begins – as individuals, and as species. *************** ALAN CATLIN These are accessible but thoughtful poems. Ries refers to himself observing the world in a down to earth manner striving for something transcendent in “Poets Nova”: “I consider these things from my bar stool / the poet's throne. A magical chair with roots / that grow limbs and a mind of its own." What he sees is the stuff of life: humorous, evocative and nostalgic as in the wonderful "The Moon Was January in Wisconsin" where he likens himself and playmates as children to the lunar astronauts in their layers of space/snow suits being allowed into the warmth of the house as entering a lunar capsule. Ries does not turn away from the harsher aspects of life as in "Watching a River Flow" where bag ladies dance near dumpsters and bums smell like a bar room floor. When spring arrives he feels the tug of a new found warmth in the loins, shedding long pants and layers, feeling the rebirth of sexual yearnings. He goes on to celebrate mature, sexual love in poems as "Erotic Geography" where the lover's body is a topographical relief map he joyously explores. Far from being pornographic, the emphasis of his many meditations on sexuality at a "certain age", are thoughtful, tempered by experience and regret, yearnings for love and divorce from it. Charles has recently largely put aside his poet's pen to work on novels he expects will never see print. What drives us to do these things? The same desire that makes us writers, that makes us human. *************** Kris Rued-Clark Many characters people his poetry, some of whom he encounters on his meanderings in Milwaukee and Mexico and parts in between, others only he sees, projected “against the movie screen / God attached to the backside of my eyeballs.” In the single poem with uncharacteristically short lines, Ries cautions us on the need for patience, so that “even a leaf / descending / downward / will shout / words of / wisdom.” In spite of this advice, he seems more at home in an urban setting, and writes with an unjaundiced yet not unkind eye about the misfits and human oddities who populate his home territory of Milwaukee. In “Watching A River Flow” he shows us a bag lady with neither contempt nor pity, but rather a willingness not merely to look, but to see and to make us see what we might otherwise miss. “Bag lady dances near the dumpster looking like / a helium balloon. She’s the gravitational center / of a plastic bag she wears for warmth. A planet / stuffed full of bathroom tissue and old newspapers. // She’s humming…something too. / In her mind she hears a hit parade.” As a Wisconsin poet, Ries cannot avoid the topics of snow and cold and the craving for spring. But even these subjects are seen freshly through his eyes. “The Moon Was January In Wisconsin,” turns into a sweetly nostalgic romp in the backyard when children were still sent outside to play in any weather, by beleaguered mothers who needed time undisturbed to prepare dinner. Winter appears in a love poem, where warmth is sacrificed upon the altar of fashion. “I love your mantric complaint about how hard it is / to dress well at 20 below zero in the midst of / a blizzard. Yet refusing to compromise for the sake of warmth instead sludging, steadfast, / like an Armani foot soldier through road salt, / snow drifts and sleet. Saying, “some things/ will not be compromised!” And in “60 Degrees of Separation,” spring, portrayed as the reawakening of passion after a long winter’s sleep, has the gift of a typical surprising Ries ending, in which “snow is sent running under / ground, and we are liberated from our / long pants.” His work is imbued with the Catholicism of his childhood and the dabblings into Buddhism of someone who came of age in the 1970’s. Into this historic perspective, one reads of his youth on a mink farm. He tells of killing mink, and extends that to war, as he confronts a draft board which questions his request for status as a conscientious objector. “Killing is killing, ain’t it son?” / “If I could kill mink, why not men?” Most lyrical when the source of his inspiration is Mexico, his Latino identity is Carlos. Reading Octavio Paz leads to stanzas like this: “Carlos blows into Olivia’s ear a love whisper, / sending a waterfall of kisses cascading out her / mouth onto brown soil where white flowers erupt.” Ries writes with bewilderment and wonder of the odd predicaments he finds himself in. Perhaps in none of his poems is he more baffled than in his love poems. He is a man who searches for love without having a clue what it is. “Valentine” as so many of his poems, explores the vagaries of love, acknowledging what a mystery it is, this desire of heart, loin, and common paths walked. In the end he concludes, “It has been better to love.” Yet in “Schnook,” he confesses to being a lazy lover, too lazy to commit, too lazy to break it off. “Points of View,” begins with a troubled love relationship and ends questioning the nature of truth. “Truth is a murky pond / A beacon for the mystic / And bacon for the liar.” He finds his inspiration from many sources: a man seated Buddha-like in a public toilet, the “Erotic Geography” of Mexico, even the bar stool, which he calls “the poet’s throne.” He writes of waiting for inspiration, “like a frog on a lily pad / scanning the sky for a fly to eat.” “I like to disappear into my head where it / doesn’t cost much to be alone.” And we’re grateful to Charles Ries for opening the window for us to share a glimpse into the world between his ears. Charles Ries is a troubadour for our times who graces us with stories of the seemingly commonplace. His work sings to us of love found and lost, of what it means to be a man journeying upon the earth at this moment. He weaves a spell, retracing the paths of angels who have descended into perplexing circumstances, but who nevertheless shine with the divinity of the everyday. Having been brought up Catholic, Ries resides comfortably in the realm of angels; and yet he treads the world of ordinary conundrums equally well. His work shines with what it means to be human, reflecting upon and transcending the reality in which he lives. *************** MICHAEL KRIESEL Topics: cold Wisconsin Winters, killing thousands of mink as a boy on his father’s mink farm, people watching at the airport, fossil penises, singles mixers, cremation, a girlfriend who quits taking her anti-depressants every Summer, Mexico and love. Many of the poems are love poems: sometimes spiritual, often the romantic kind, traveling the different road our hearts can lead us down.
SELECTED REVIEWS FOR Review by Kris Rued-Clark (7498 County Trunk N / Arpin, WI / 54410) Charles Ries takes us on journeys through both hemispheres as he traverses inner and outer terrain, searching for love and redemption in Monjé Malo Speaks English. His poems are peopled with an eccentric array of characters. Indeed, Charles Ries comfortably assumes such an assortment of personae that we’re tempted to ask, “Will the real Charles Ries please stand up?” He writes as a 95 year old man, a Latin lover, a younger brother, a Buddhist. As a gas company line worker, he describes the Friday night action viewed from his front steps: “Sometimes I wish Elaine/ were Mexican. Hot, sweet and the ruler of my passion, / but she’s from North Dakota, a silent state where / you drink to feel and dance and cry.” Here is one prolific poet who never runs out of things to say, the wry observer who cannot detach, but is always immersed in the predicaments in which he finds himself. He confesses to being unable to sleep because he belongs to the group with “minds as busy as New York City. / Even at midnight the city on our shoulders / does not sleep. Does not rest.” He takes up where he left off in his previous book, Bad Monk. The perplexities he confronts appear immediately in the title, as he tells us in Spanish that Monjé Malo, the bad monk, speaks English. The title itself becomes one more layer of ambiguity for us to enter with him as he struggles for meaning in a world gone mad. Nothing is as it seems, and there are no easy answers. And so, we bumble along with the gentle, confused poet, sometimes numbed by scotch, frequently bewildered by love’s encounters. He admits to us that “my conquests are fictionalized.” An essential part of these poems is a great tenderness. One senses an immense heart at the root of all his ruminations, whether he’s sailing the uncertain waters of male/female relationships, or charting the course of gender expectations. No subject is taboo. He uses a bullfight in Mexico to muse on the rage of the bull. It’s significant that he is presented with the ear of the vanquished beast. He hears the song of the bull’s life, and shares it with us, even as he salutes and cheers the bull, “who symbolized the burden of rage / and the insanity of being born male.” He also writes movingly as a dad who is informed about his daughter’s first period. “What should I do?” “Nothing, you’re the dad. / Dads aren’t supposed to know.” “Of course I don’t know about it. / Not invited into the Women Only Blood Club. / Staying clueless – the elegantly simpler gender.” He has stated that he is working on a book about growing up Catholic. Even this much explored territory will become fresh in his hands. Catholicism is the religion which lies beneath Latin dance rhythms and voodoo. One feels both elements underlying Charles Ries’ work: an irrepressible joie de vivre arising in spite of, or perhaps because of life’s struggles, and a hypnotic otherworldliness, a compelling urge to go deeper under the surface, to what lies beneath. We see the poet acknowledging both a dark current and a desire to dive into the mysteries, swimming for his life. He weaves a spell with his many moods, casting a net of dreams that come back to haunt us. “Isn’t that why we dream? To have the impossible for just a moment? To reach / for things beyond our grasp during those times when falling and dreaming live / suspended above our kitchen sink, answering machine, and dinner table?” Charles Ries can describe Jesus at the craps tables in Las Vegas and make it work. “He wasn’t the stuffy Jesus / I’d seen on the velvet paintings, but the smiling / laughing one with the windswept hair I had seen / pictured on the covers of New Age magazines. / Spreading his light around like a bullwhip.” He also describes visiting a church for a conversation with Jesus. “I leave the church grateful to God for taking time out of His busy / schedule to speak to me, and continue the work of fictionalizing my past.” Monjé brings to mind the French word manger, to eat. Charles Ries makes us want to join him for the banquet, gobbling all of life’s experiences in great, gasping gulps. Writing as a 95 year old man, he tells us that these final years “wouldn’t be so bad were it not for / the famine that surrounds me. Emasculated / foot soldiers who traded the good life for the / promised land and a second home on the lake. / I called them squares. Because it seemed to / me the real world was a round rolling place / that we were meant to devour. So here they sit around me, my fading ancient / brothers and sisters waiting for a ride home on / the wings of an angel and a celestial reward for / a life half eaten.” Like Zorba the Greek, he pulls us along with his great zest for life, and he leaves us asking for more. Charles Ries invites us into his world and takes us along for one helluva ride. We witness a stampede of thoughts, a torrent of words that will not be stopped. Here is a man in a rush to get on with life. He makes us want to jump in the saddle, too, riding not behind, but alongside this great, big-hearted bear of a poet. |
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