Under Review: In a Riptide by Ronna Bloom

We are pulled into Ronna Bloom’s In a Riptide through “Immeasurable,” the first poem in the collection. In thirteen lines, Bloom thrusts us into the swirling tension between desire and an ever-elusive contentment. “Today a woman of no measurable age stopped me / to ask where she could buy some meat, and her eyes / filled up with tears when it seemed too far or impossible / and every shop was closed.” As the poem progresses, we linger in moments of stillness: “I could do nothing but stand there, / vibrating in the hesitant spring. We were just two more / meandering women in the empty street.” Bloom asks us to contemplate and even embody stillness in an environment that refuses to offer it, not unlike the riptide for which the collection is titled. The characters in this collection face cancer diagnoses, despair, death, and even a showering Buddha. They manage to catch glimpses of beauty in the brief pauses between thrashing water.

The poem continues, “Some of us / looking down as though illness could pass through the eyes, / others looking up, sending out our million help-me messages.” Here we find the beginning tendrils of one of several motifs woven into the fabric of this collection. As in the second line, Bloom draws our focus to the eyes as liminal spaces where feelings appear but aren’t spoken; where relationships are birthed or destroyed from across a room; where we hold every word we might say to a loved one existing in the purgatories of grief or illness.

Moving into the final lines of the poem, we’re introduced to the four people the Buddha meets during his travels: the sick person, the old person, the dead person, and the happy person with nothing. They serve as the formal structure of the poetry collection, but also as the moral undercurrent that powers the collection forward.

At times, In a Riptide is akin to a conversation with a dear friend we haven’t seen in a long time. Some poems, like “Love is Not Pie,” read like narratives in which someone reminisces out loud about the past in that nonlinear way we talk when we don’t have to perform because we’re speaking to a person with a shared past. There’s humour in the conversation, as in “The Buddha Prepares for a Triple Bypass,” where the Buddha lies proud of his hairless chest, which offers germs no place to hide. There’s also pain, horniness, the occasional existential crisis, and of course, wine. What this collection offers, at the center of it all, is space to contemplate and reckon with a world that never stills and hardly slows.       

In the opening section, To Show the Scars: sick person, we get the first iteration of “Vulnerable to” and one of many testaments to Bloom’s ability to create and wield imagery with precision. Bloom is first vulnerable to shock, with descriptions like “gut-sharked” and “simped out,” which stood out for their sharpness as well as the surprise they offered. She is vulnerable to wonder by way of a person processing a cancer diagnosis, who makes us sit with the beauty that grows from suffering: “An x-rayed tumour on a spine / looks like a wad of gum on a radial tire. / Will it be cut out like jam from hair?” The image feels nostalgically whimsical, tucked gently into the folds of sorrow, lying in wait for the next person to find it.

Bloom is vulnerable to ancestry and sadness, “I, descendant of those chased from villages and violated / into violence.” Like any of us, Bloom came into being thanks to someone else’s dreams and nightmares, existed as a figment of consciousness before atoms from a dead star formed the cells in her mother’s womb and made her tangible.

“Like a nickel lodged in the throat / shiny but scratched,” we are rich in sadness and other emotions we do not want. This leads us to the final iteration of “Vulnerable to,” where Bloom is vulnerable to grief, sex, food, and spirit. “Great greedy mouthfuls of longing / and soup” continues Bloom’s sharp imagery, with the long-O assonance that makes my mouth gape when I read out loud. 

The throughline of vulnerability is apt for a poetry collection that offers an authentic surveying of life in its infinite contradictions and conundrums. Bloom pokes fun at herself between such gems like, “Poetry is free but will cost you everything. / The body is free but will cost you everything plus itself,” a couplet that pinged in my brain for days after I read it. There’s lightheartedness in guest stars like Charles Bukowski and Emily Dickinson, who share a poem, or Sisyphus, who finally catches a break. Through it all, Bloom invites us to be still, even when it doesn’t seem like an option. She acquaints us with the Buddhist concept of anattā, an impermanent self, and encourages us to detach from the influences of emotions stemming from a constant stream of tribulations in order to find liberation, and maybe even peace.

 

In a Riptide by Ronna Bloom

Brick Books, 15 September 2025

128 pages

$23.95