This poet is a lithe acrobat, her ricocheting thoughts tightly woven by stunning images. The poems think, yet movement is concrete, specific, tuned with details: ". . . watch the bright / balled-up leaves in the boiled water unfurl and float, / like mini Esther Williams doing the backstroke." Or ". . . let's not forget the invisible; / the mosquito the size of a torn // eyelash . . ." The poems in Ricochet Script decry and bless the human condition. Alexandra van de Kamp's use of irony, pathos to describe inner and outer worlds, and her close investigation of mortality brings us a book to savor, to read slowly, expectations raised to the excitement and beauty of what is next.

--Veronica Golos, author of GIRL

In the atmospheric Ricochet Script, poems are rendered not only in the high contrast of film noir, but in the flesh tones of unmediated raw material-the body and the life gathered around it. "Elegy to My Uterus with a Glass of Pinot Noir" effortlessly blends the body and the cinematic: "When they told me you had to go, / I envisioned myself on a train in a 1950s European war film, staring out / at a country I'd never see again." Alexandra van de Kamp takes delight in the tools of her trade. Language shimmers with meaning and eroticism, words themselves become "rounded and ridged morsels." While the mood sometimes darkens, the voice of these entrancing poems is sophisticated, ardent, witty, and passionate.