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Emergency Brake
2015 Wrolstad Contemporary Poetry Series selection
"Ruth Madievsky's first collection is an announcement like a bomb going off, like a super wave coming to swallow us up! For my part I am thrilled to be taken away by such energetic, funny, and heartbreaking work. This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."
- Matthew Dickman
"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."
- David St. John
"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"
- ZYZZYVA
"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."
- Columbia Journal
"Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, 'Do it again! Do it again!'”
- Harpur Palate
"Ruth Madievsky's first collection is an announcement like a bomb going off, like a super wave coming to swallow us up! For my part I am thrilled to be taken away by such energetic, funny, and heartbreaking work. This is a new voice made of sunlight, knives, emergencies, heat, honesty, bottles of vodka, and a tanker full of talent. Madievsky has created something we should not go without."
- Matthew Dickman
"Go ahead, try all you want pulling on Ruth Madievsky’s Emergency Brake—but just remember it won’t do you any good. This will be the most exciting and inventive first book you have read in years, and this poet’s take-no-prisoners attitude makes for an ecstatic joyride. These deeply moving poems reflect the raw darkness paring at the edges of our lives, and they reveal how that dark can sometimes move to the very centers of our being. Sexy, irreverent, sorrowful, thrilling—the poems of Emergency Brake become a young woman’s survival manual for the Twenty-First Century: ignore it at your own peril."
- David St. John
"...a metaphor-maker par excellence"
- ZYZZYVA
"The social importance of Emergency Brake doesn’t come at the cost of artful finesse; a cleverly engineered speaker who invites distrust through sly direction guides us through the collection’s gallery of sex and Los Angeles sprawl..."
- Columbia Journal
"Emergency Brake is filled with boxcar after boxcar of metaphors you’ll wish you wrote, but Madievsky got to them first. You’ll want to hate her if it wasn’t for that sugary child jumping up and down behind your ribs, yelling, 'Do it again! Do it again!'”
- Harpur Palate
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
Published February 14, 2016
About the author
Ruth Madievsky
5 books118 followersRuth Madievsky is the author of a novel, "All-Night Pharmacy" (Catapult, 2023) and a bestselling poetry collection, "Emergency Brake." Her work appears in The Atlantic, The Los Angeles Times, Harper's Bazaar, Tin House, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Them, and elsewhere. She is originally from Moldova and lives in Los Angeles, where she works as an HIV and primary care pharmacist.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
February 18, 2020
In the words of Jami Attenberg: "Please forgive me while I give my own book five stars but if one does not believe their own book deserves five stars then why bother writing." I published "Emergency Brake" 4 years ago and still feel proud to share it. Thanks to all who have read, shared, and taught my poems <3
Shelved as 'dnf'
March 5, 2020It's a matter of personal preference: I don't love the "scattershot" poems that wind from topic to topic and don't seem to land everywhere. No thanks.
May 2, 2020
What a stunning collection. Haunting and light, humorous and cutting. The kind of poems that rattle around in your skull long after you shelve the book.
April 27, 2016
Unstable relationships, disaffection with a modern (urban) lifestyle, and mortality: those seem to be the primary focus of EMERGENCY BRAKE. Madievsky plumbs her themes fiercely, and the poems delivered resonated with me across almost the entirety of the collection--a rarity for poetry collections I've read. There are probably a variety of reasons for my reaction, not all of which I understand, but if I had to guess it would be because of her restrained style: It's prose poetry that finds the middle ground between poetry and prose, not fully eschewing either (my favorite style, as a reader); she's also taken care to craft pointed metaphors to explain feelings, and since the metaphors worked well for me, it was just one more reason to love the work. And because her subject matter, although approached from the personal, is accessible for the average reader (rather than abstraction or philosophical underpinnings that take unbearable effort to dig up), the poems were relatable and ultimately moving.
If there's any weakness in the collection, it's that Madievsky's thematic focus feels so narrow that, at times, the poems seem to retrace ground already covered. But, given how well she does it, there's nothing wrong with experiencing *nearly* identical thoughts multiple times, at least not for this reader.
On the whole, a very strong collection from a poet who (I'm guessing) is just getting started. Highly recommended.
If there's any weakness in the collection, it's that Madievsky's thematic focus feels so narrow that, at times, the poems seem to retrace ground already covered. But, given how well she does it, there's nothing wrong with experiencing *nearly* identical thoughts multiple times, at least not for this reader.
On the whole, a very strong collection from a poet who (I'm guessing) is just getting started. Highly recommended.
January 2, 2017
"When I remember the past as burglary,
I think the body is a door, and what is a door
But a crime scene waiting to happen,
The way a needle waits to happen to a vein."
In her imaginative collection, Ruth Madievsky utilizes the imagery of everyday - dirty, charged, sometimes mundane - to develop her own brand of body-centered ontology.
I think the body is a door, and what is a door
But a crime scene waiting to happen,
The way a needle waits to happen to a vein."
In her imaginative collection, Ruth Madievsky utilizes the imagery of everyday - dirty, charged, sometimes mundane - to develop her own brand of body-centered ontology.
May 11, 2016
A voice that lodges in the head. Metaphors stacked and stacked. No object too insignificant to be compared to the tension of this life. A fresh nest of images. I've been following Madievsky's journal publications for the last year and it was a thrill to see this first book live up to their energy.
April 10, 2016
a rich and enthralling read! LOVED this.
August 12, 2019
Emergency Brake is a hard book to rate as it felt inconsistent to me. I loved the originality of metaphors used; it is, in truth, one of the most original and unusual books of poetry I've read in a long time in terms of its' turns of phrasing and play of words, drawing heavily on the author's immersion into the medical research field of study. At times, some of the poems shined with a brilliant stream of word pictures while others just felt a bit of a jumble of words that didn't quite fit and got all tossed together. Moreover, and to be fair as I almost rated this a four star, I found that there was a underlying repetition of them of sexual abuse/assault that I found triggering and it wasn't just about poems where that was a main feature, but it was a clear underlying element in so many of the poems. It felt like life: random comments from boss or guy at a party, touch unwelcome, touch remembered from long ago. Honestly, it felt like it should come with a trigger warning label. Beyond that, it was real and honest and both tragic in terms of the sexual abuse and silencing of young people about such, but also celebratory anyway of sex and expression and embracing.
Like I said, a really hard one for me to rate and I'm not sure I can be objective. For me, overall, the high creativity makes it a four, the inconsistency and personal punch to it dropped it to a three.
Like I said, a really hard one for me to rate and I'm not sure I can be objective. For me, overall, the high creativity makes it a four, the inconsistency and personal punch to it dropped it to a three.
Read
June 24, 2019"In Los Angeles, someone's replaced
all the oxygen with surgical grade stainless steel,
someone's tagged all the freeway overpasses
and I can't tell if they wrote HELEN
or HELP. Everyone I love is trying
to shine me like a flashlight,
everyone I love is telling me
to say ahh. In my backyard, forty ants
are sharing a slice of watermelon,
and I don't know why that makes me feel
lonely, why I wish I was their size
and with them, fighting for the juiciest piece
with everyone I love
or just letting them have it."
all the oxygen with surgical grade stainless steel,
someone's tagged all the freeway overpasses
and I can't tell if they wrote HELEN
or HELP. Everyone I love is trying
to shine me like a flashlight,
everyone I love is telling me
to say ahh. In my backyard, forty ants
are sharing a slice of watermelon,
and I don't know why that makes me feel
lonely, why I wish I was their size
and with them, fighting for the juiciest piece
with everyone I love
or just letting them have it."
Read
January 27, 2020So many poems here use fascinating imagery to build a house of existential pain. I truly appreciate the communication of this pain. I wish I got a better understanding of where the pain comes from.
people turn back into objects
If I throw enough lamps will you come.
When I open, I want to be the umbrella
not the pocket knife.
Something inside me
scattering like deer.
sing your aria, little man.
all my life
I've been a charley horse in the thigh of some god.
June 12, 2018
Madievsky's poems take a gritty, urban landscape (both literal and figurative) and imbue it with beauty without sanitizing pain and brokenness. While the poems are carefully crafted, they come across as voice-driven, immediate, as if you've popped into the page to listen to a friend recounting her experiences, slicing them open for you, plumbing them for meaning. It's all very ugly beautiful.
January 18, 2019
Will revisit when I’m a more mature poetry reader ~ a lotta oh I get it I get I get it nope I don’t get it
@jen if you go premed and write poetry this is what I envision
But thank you Ms. G for lending me this, hopefully I’ll read something this year worth lending back
Some favorites (maybe the few I felt confidently cognizant??):
LIGHT SWITCH
BRIDGE, SHADOW, HAND (for those 3 lines)
@jen if you go premed and write poetry this is what I envision
But thank you Ms. G for lending me this, hopefully I’ll read something this year worth lending back
Some favorites (maybe the few I felt confidently cognizant??):
LIGHT SWITCH
BRIDGE, SHADOW, HAND (for those 3 lines)
March 14, 2017
Wonderful collection. Ruth has a flawless ear and self awareness that allows her to observe and undermine herself at the same time, while displaying a wide sense of humor. Made me rethink relationships. Highly recommended.
May 30, 2017
tears and love
September 1, 2017
If I could give this book a hundred stars, I would.
January 13, 2018
The way she looks at the world in these poems is so unique and so enchanting.
February 7, 2019
new favorite xo
September 26, 2019
Raw and fucking real. And I don’t say raw in the way hipsters who read Bukowski say “raw”. I mean, this girl writes from her guts.
November 23, 2019
It would be hard to find a finer debut. Madievsky's work is striking and powerful.
December 30, 2022
Love her ability to stretch limits, her genius crafting of metaphors. Delightful juxtapositions.
October 2, 2016
I purchased this collection after falling in love with Madievsky's poem "Electrons" on poem-a-day (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/e...) and it delivers the goods that poem promised. I especially appreciate the way Madievsky manipulates the language of medicine and pharmaceuticals, mining that jargon to render something exquisite and precise and new.
“I spend most days hoping for release
and not knowing from what.”- “Mountain”
“I spend most days hoping for release
and not knowing from what.”- “Mountain”
December 4, 2016
At first glance, this is a type of collection I'd shrug at and then walk away from, but the more I think about it, the more it sticks and the more I enjoy it. The true barrage of images thrown at the reader might seem odd at first, but it builds momentum and strength as the collection carries on, and it helps to demonstrate the anxiety and fear within these situations. Beyond just the surface level of these poems, this collection is truly unsettling - but in the best of ways.
Want to read
November 4, 2016I received this book for free through Goodreads Giveaways. It is autographed.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews