Survivable World [Paperback]

Ron Mohring (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0915380552 | ISBN-13: 978-0915380558 | Publication Date: January 2004

Poetry "with an emotional honesty that gives voice to the ever changing vectors of promise and loss in a world marked by the devastation of AIDS" -- Betsy Sholl. Cover Art by Fred Wilkinson. Winner of the 2003 Washington Prize.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Mohring artfully (and heartfully) scours the surfaces of love and loss. -- Scott Hightower January 2004

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: The Word Works, Inc. (January 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0915380552
• ISBN-13: 978-0915380558
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,198,702 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful humanistic poems, March 10, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Survivable World (Paperback)

These poems speak artfully and with firsthand knowledge about the human impact of AIDS.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Notes from a Caregiver's Hand and Heart, December 14, 2008

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Survivable World (Paperback)

Few poets have been able to convey the power of a love story as that that Ron Mohring shares in his gently gripping collection of poems SURVIVABLE WORLD. Though these poems are all connected to the loss of his lover David to AIDS, they refuse to enter the realm of morose, morbid, and synthetically manipulated sobbings. Instead what Mohring has created are captured memories and moments of a life shared as wholly as any two lovers in memory. His poems delineate the struggle with the slow decline of the exodus from the living world in a matter of fact style that allows the reader to observe the complex machinations of the daily routines that accompany disease - the thoughts from the caregiver role as well as the lover's quiet anguish, watching the one person that has completed his life, slowly, and with both loss of dignity that is real, as well as the loving that makes the coping mechanisms beautiful.

Mohring gives us the memories born before the disease, the shock and ultimate management of reality, the quiet moments of death and goodbyes, and even the post mortem attempts to find life again, alone. In TO HAVE AND TO HOLD he ends his poem with these words: '...You'd gone before/ the funeral, before the doctor signed/ you dead, switched off the machine/ bullying your lungs. I would touch your skull - / frontal, parietal, occipital - and mourn what it/ contained, what couldn't last, knowing/ this receptacle was all that would remain,/ gutted bowl and useless frame kiln-fired, fractured,/ packaged and delivered to my living hands.'

This miraculous collection of poems will doubtless be a source of comfort to the survivors of this plague, but is should be read by everyone who faces the truths of mortality. There is a generous amount of love in SURVIVABLE WORLD, enough to encourage even the most fragile among us whose vision of death is threatening. In Ron Mohring's hand life becomes even more treasured. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, December 08

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mohring Speaks, July 14, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Survivable World (Paperback)

I recently bought and read Mohring's Survivable World. This is a book of beautiful, harsh, soft, exacting words on love, desire, and a body's decline. I think a qualifier of truly great poetry is whether we'd read a poem aloud to someone else. More than once, I've done this with my favorite poems in Survivable World, the shorter of which I'll copy below.

"David Speaks in a Dream" recommends the book in a way better than my own words possibly can--I give Mohring's book my highest recommendation, to anyone who's had, or lost, a friend with AIDS, or simply to anyone who's loved--in short, to anyone.

"David Speaks in a Dream"

Not in sleep are you closest
to the dead. Not in dreams.

It is after making love: the hammering
heart, the incandescent soul, the two

synchronized: the body has focused
almost enough energy

to throw itself away.
I am nearly with you then.