The Time We Have Misspent

About the Author

M. Z. Ribalow is a poet, playwright and author. His novel Peanuts and Crackerjacks, his new play Masterpiece and his poetry collection Chasing Ghosts are 2011 publications, and his short fiction appeared in an anthology on Luck in 2010. His two dozen plays have received some 180 productions in a dozen countries; four have been published. His work has been anthologized and has won prizes in London, New York, and regionally. He is series editor of the Plays from New River volumes (McFarland Publications) and has also co-written ten children's books and non-fiction books on sports, baseball and chess. He writes frequently on film, theatre, literature, music, and has appeared as a film historian on The Discovery Channel and on special feature documentaries of several DVD releases of classic films. He is Artistic Director and co-founder of New River Dramatists, which has for the last decade successfully developed hundreds of new plays and screenplays while discovering and nurturing gifted writers, and which also presents poetry, fiction and drama on the New River Radio Show on Art International Radio online. He lives in New York City, where he is currently full-time artist-in-residence at Fordham University.

Praise for "The Time We Have Misspent"

"With this collection of sonnets, Meir Z. Ribalow takes his rightful place alongside the likes of Frost, Millay, Shelley, Keats and - yes, I'll say it - Shakespeare, as one of our rare masters of the English language sonnet form. The evident joy with which Mr. Ribalow plays with language in each gem contained in this volume shows the freedom he feels where others find constraint; in the mere fourteen lines allotted him, Mr. Ribalow manages to take his readers on journeys as deep and as intimate as they are epic. You will be delighted, charmed, moved and awed by what you find in this collection. It is nothing short of astonishing."
     -Rhona Silverbush, co-author, Speak the Speech! Shakespeare's Monologues Illuminated

"By turns heartbreaking, wry, clever, and devastating (and sometimes all that and more in a single poem), these sonnets marry a precise attention to form with a casual conversational tone to create a universe of yearning observation. Combining the couplets of Pope with the concerns of Petrarch, Ribalow has created something new under the poetic sun that feels fresh and timeless at the same time. If you think sonnet-writing is a lost art, then this is the book to change your mind."
     -Matthew Wells, 2011 winner of the Donna Jo Davis Discovery Prize for Poetry

"I'm not one for poems as words-to-live-by...except when they're words to live by, like almost every one of these. They don't so much rediscover or reinvent the sonnet as remind us why we loved sonnets in the first place."
     -Glen Hirshberg, winner of the 2008 Shirley Jackson Award, author of Motherless Child and The Book of Bunk

"This is an intelligent poet willing to address with tenderness, sometimes bluntness, all that he does not know - namely the reasons and rationales for the way a life unfolds. Still, 'I breathe as deeply as I dare,' he says, and in the saying makes his reader want to breathe more deeply as well."
     -Allison Elrod, 2012 winner of the Donna Jo Davis Discovery Prize for Poetry