"Ron Slate's Joy Ride moves with the movement of the mind. History and memory twine with the present, as spectral and intangible as the past. Loss and grief are not treated as spectacle, but they imbue every line. I love the way I feel when I read Joyce's and Chekhov's stories. These poems put me in a similar state–a kind of fugue, a surreal strangeness, but with a grounded adherence to the ordinary. Whatever this feeling is, there's no word for it. It's what I seek when I read and write poems, but to find it is rare. Joy Ride is the dream that the passage of time wakes in us."–Diane Seuss
