Max Ritvo’s Precision Poetry

Abstract

This essay reads Max Ritvo’s poetry through a chronology of precision biomedicine: imaging, diagnosis, and treatment. Ritvo’s construction of a patient-consumer avatar in his poetry reflects his position at a biomedical frontier, while poetic form becomes a way of retrieving bodies from a logic of substitution and surrogacy. A body lying under the weight of relentless, and relentlessly variable, imaging is catapulted through memory to a place by the sea in “The Curve.” In “Poem to My Litter,” the speaker addresses the laboratory mice injected with his tumors, drawing himself closer to them through their shared imprisonment in bodies on their way out of life, and suspending a bioeconomy embedded in a moral economy of sacrifice and faith. If precision medicine depends on making the analogical and metaphorical into common consensus—images that stand in for bodies, codes that stand in for disease—then Ritvo upends its neat architecture. He sticks instead with the messiness of bodies failing to meet an elusive salvation.