Breaking Out of the Cocoon

Not for the faint of heart, the poems in Breaking Out of the Cocoon tell the story of a family in crisis and a woman "tortured in mind, body and soul" who is pushed off an unthinkable edge. Through her poetic accounting of these distressing events, Ryabchich attempts to contain the tragedy hidden in the poet's signature and bones, eradicating it as "weeds pulled from the flower garden until it blooms no more." Like "twilight emerging from Heaven after a downpour-after everything seemed doomed to disaster," these poems take the reader on an emotional journey from the depths of suffering to an ultimate place of healing.

-Claudine Nash, author of Beginner's Guide to Loss in the Multiverse and The Wild Essential




"A child's frightened eyes tiptoe through darkness." I'm betting Anne Sexton would have liked that line and many more in this volume, just as she'd admire the carefully chosen verbs throughout-such as those used to spill the beans of the characters she allows us to meet-dozens of them, including: slanted, nestled, oozing, trashed, shunned, jabbed, and beaten. These poems will have a fine journey.

-Dan Masterson, Poet Laureate of Rockland County




An unworldly lady emptied of heartache had just a needle and a thread of optimism to suture her failing heart, Lisa takes us through the finespun yarn of self-destructive near adventure of injury and intimacy; of wanting badly to live; of needing to undo knotted arteries clotted in purpling sting. In these instructive poems, a nameless child running to 'evade injustice' is thrown into a whirlpooling kindergarten of daily filth, a blinding black hole where his ancestry knives through his feelings and forces him to find balance between reminiscences and scavenging through shadowy spaces-in search of hope at the mouth of a city glowing in orange sunrise, we unearth enchanting surprises in verse, a flutter finally finds its reason to wing through unchartered paths.... Then there's the 'Crazy Bastard'! This collection suffices as an anecdotal mirror especially in these troubling times.

-Shittu Fowora