Divorce Comedy 

by Ronnie Ferguson

(2024, Harvard Square Press)

Ronnie Ferguson's latest book in the Selfies series is a powerful meditation on a fissuring family in the industrial heartland. Each inventive poem offers a penetrating vision into the depths of a formative event, creating a poignant mosaic. As with previous installments—When I Was a Fire and A Good Fight is Hard to Find—Divorce Comedy weaves the terrifying with the tender, the humorous with the harrowing, the concrete and accessible with the ineffable. It's all there from the spotlight-clarity of the title to the last line's curtain call.

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Ronnie Ferguson’s poems are honest and gritty, willing to confront the tensions and violence that mar so many human relationships. Yet rather than surrender to rage, they extend grace and forgiveness. The poems are serious yet accessible, imaginative yet grounded, realistic without being ordinary. Read them once and you will feel compelled to read them again, and again.

Lynn Domina, author of Inland Sea

In twelve poems whose masterful rhetoric runs down the page with surprise and grace, Ronnie Ferguson relives, with unflinching honesty, events spanning from rocky early days to manhood. One of three children to troubled parents with health issues, his upsets and losses remind us that the blueprint for home is drawn in early childhood; from then on, it is a place we carry within us no matter where we go. The poet says as much in “Father’s Day, 2017,” when he tells his dead father, “i hear your wild laugh wherever we roam as though the past ripples alongside the present.” Yet, these parents, because imperfect, magnify the author’s compassion and humanity. In this work, Ronnie Ferguson journeys from broken things to cohesion and forgiveness. Love remains long after we’ve stopped reading.

Beverly Matherne, Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

A Good Fight is Hard to Find 

by Ronnie Ferguson

(2024, Harvard Square Press)

A Good Fight is Hard to Find, the second book in the Selfies series, chronicles the intertwined lives of two boys. With insight, humor, depth, and raw honesty, Ferguson crafts a narrative poem in six parts, recounting the mischief and follies of youth, and how these things come to form the contemplative, tender core of a man. Building upon When I Was a Fire, the poignant first installment, A Good Fight is Hard to Find is also sure to please and move readers as a stand-alone work, a tale of grit and sincerity with skillful lines to savor on every page.

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From the opening bell, Ronnie Ferguson's A Good Fight is Hard to Find pulls no punches, landing bruising body shots to the heart and stiff uppercuts to anyone who thinks they can navigate the world with a stiff upper lip. With deft turns of phrase that flutter and jab, these narratives hammer away at unvarnished truths, offering visceral and raw honesty that leaves us unsteady on our feet. It can feel bleak to live with fists always at the ready, but perhaps bleaker still, to throw in the towel and believe nothing can ever be won. Ferguson's poetry will make you flinch in the best possible way, ducking and weaving with wonder, struggling to stay upright, hoping you won't be counted out without knowing, at last, what it feels like to see some stars.

Jeff Kass, author of Teacher/Pizza Guy, a 2020 Michigan Notable Book

In A Good Fight is Hard to Find, Ronnie Ferguson continues his tender meditation on childhood, reminding us that however difficult a life might be, the long arms of art can reach through time, allowing us to embrace those who are gone. There is a quiet power in this lucid work, which showcases the mind and the heart revisiting moments of grit and vulnerability. In the intersection of what is brutal and what is gentle, we hear Ferguson thinking about the various ways affection can be both disguised and expressed. As he writes, "i found its truth / to be greater than any memory." 

Cindy Hunter Morgan, author of Harborless and Far Company

When I Was a Fire 

by Ronnie Ferguson

(2024, Harvard Square Press)

When I Was a Fire is a striking, heartfelt debut collection of poems. Primarily set in the Rust Belt, these narrative poems encounter the shame and pain of childhood to glimpse the glory of redemption and hope. These are pieces that see their way through their own tense, first-grade arms folded across a school desk. See through a crack in the door to spy a monkey face on the other side. See through the smoke of a fire started to test exactly how the repercussions would roll. When I Was a Fire is sure to be a source of illumination to those who have wandered the lonely, dry neighborhood backyards all summer, struck a match, and arrived on the other side.

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Ronnie Ferguson's poetry is the real deal — authentic, accessible, funny, moving, and distinctly working class. Steeped in storytelling, brimming with heart, When I Was a Fire is fueled by the poignant moments of a Rust-Belt childhood where the bruises burn, dead friends and fathers haunt the landscape, and victory can be found in the strange defeats. The part I like best about this skillfully written debut collection is the way Ferguson often concludes his pieces with beautiful and unexpected lines that astonish — the magic of great poetry.

Reagan M. Sova, author of Wildcat Dreams in the Death Light and Tiger Island

Reading Ronnie Ferguson’s When I Was a Fire is like tearing a Band-Aid off childhood. Underneath, you find a wound that, although decades old, still pulses pink and raw. From an elementary classroom where a teacher dispenses embarrassment in a green bucket, to a youth wrestling tournament where “i was fighting / for any piece of another life,” these poems capture the ineffability of growing up in a world where neighbors sit in lawn chairs, sipping cheap wine “the color of blood,” watching a family’s home burn down. Ferguson’s language is spare, full of gritty humor, and each page debrides the pains, joys, and struggles of a working-class youth. Be warned: When I Was a Fire will break you into pieces and then stitch you back together.

Marty Achatz, two-time Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula