MUSEUM BEASTS, poetry by Ray Keifetz

Publication Date: December 15, 2023

Paperback, 80 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-54-7

$22.50 retail, $18.00 from publisher

This new poetry collection begins with images of violence and loss, of “blood prints / on the wall.” It tells of a world where “All that can be lost / has been lost.” That would seem to make for a grim undertaking, except it’s not quite true, for there remains memory, and imagination, and Ray Keifetz has imagined a vivid world into being – perhaps our world, or what it was, or what it will be – strange but recognizable, and strangely beautiful even when he ventures into dark places. His title poem calls to mind natural history dioramas depicting exotic animals in their lost habitats, “A meadow / in memory of meadows. / A sea / in memory of seas.” His poems serve a similar function, each a compelling vignette capturing a moment of life, in memory of life. Keifetz is a clear-eyed realist about our world – “Whoever praised the shore / lied about the tide” – and he knows how porous the boundary is separating human and beast: “How long did we hold / our two-leggedness, / our man and woman-ness, / before we dropped to our knees / and feasted?” But ultimately he is hopeful – “How long can it rain / until the rainbow” – and he shows a way forward in the simplest of acts, for in planting “even a seed — / you dig // the opposite / of a grave.”

Praise for Ray Keifetz & Museum Beasts

Blood or stone,

no one from here

goes anywhere.

Our angels run deep.

Ray Keifetz’s Museum Beasts reads like Cormac McCarthy in free verse. It’s post-apocalyptic, terrible in its beauty. Animals are dead, people are dead and dying in a wasteland. In “Red Brick City” we read “The song birds are gone. / The graveyards are closed. /Nobody sings, nobody groans.” Because deep in our souls, and perhaps because this is poetry, we hope for a movement toward hope and resurrection. Somehow, we think, the people speaking these dark poems will find a way to transcend the barren world they live in, but they don’t. The collection’s final poem is as close to hopeful as the poet allows—to an apple tree encircled by woods and hemlock a voice says

Those who planted you

are in the earth. But deer

have long memories.

You will not be alone

in the dark.

The world of Museum Beasts is not yet lost. Someone remembers what it’s like to bear fruit.

—Rick Campbell, author of Sometimes the Light & Provenance

What is the human beast? For Ray Keifetz we are “children of the ax,” defilers of the land, custodians of the raw emptiness that we create in an obsessional desire to seize the goblet of wealth and power. There are no grails in Keifetz’s poetry, no quests for the soul’s redemption. We look through a long lens backwards into incomprehension, reaching towards an empathy of survival in a world where species and cultures slip into extinction. His poems are the tender voice of fury that knows that beauty survives in contradiction and memory. The title poem ends with the haunting image of “All these eyes / of glass / in memory of light.” Keifetz’s poetry brings us to this light and lets us comprehend that we, too, have “eyes of glass” in a museum with transparent walls.

—Andrea Moorhead, Editor, Osiris

Ray Keifetz’s new poetic myths are a mash-up of Oz, del Toro, and trippy end of the world nightmare vibes. Come down these barbed wire boulevards filled with graves, ghosts, and revenge. All that’s missing is a Diamanda Galas soundtrack. To riff on Pogo—We have met the monsters and they are us.

—Richard Peabody, editor, Gargoyle Magazine

The poems in Museum Beasts are places. Leaving us alone in each of them to discover what worlds his words create, Keifetz offers us a singular experience. There’s no imagining these places or having them described for us. Rather, we’re given full access to what at first may seem unfamiliar until, led by his careful language’s guidance, we begin to see what has previously been unseen. We’re suddenly aware of how stimulated and excited all of our senses have become. How each one’s opening encounters every one of our new selves as they live and breathe through the poems he’s assembled from these places. Even our nerve endings awaken from their dormancy in spite of the imitative and repetitive world that has numbed them. And being fortunate enough to feel their reversion to an earlier life, when it was unnecessary to pretend the beast in us existed, how we have, as Keifetz explains “turned into children / who don’t come back.”

—Paul B. Roth, editor, The Bitter Oleander Press

About the Author

Ray Keifetz is the author of two poetry collections: Night Farming in Bosnia, Bitter Oleander Press, winner of that press’s Library of Poetry award; and Museum Beasts, Broadstone Books. His stories and poems have appeared in the Ashland Creek Press, Gargoyle, Kestrel, Osiris, Phantom Drift, RHINO, and others, and have received three Pushcart Prize nominations. He lives and writes in rural New Hampshire.