“John Rybicki is our great true poet of ecstasy. His poems are soulful, enraptured, euphonic, but they are not without the fevers of grief. In fact at the core of When All the World Is Old is the death of the poet’s beloved wife. It is the restless wrestling with the gravity of loss that makes these praise poems rather than elegies, that gives them more fire than darkness. Even the quietest poems here vibrate intensely. They will make you vibrate.”

“John Rybicki’s elegies break and mend your heart, then break it again. When All the World Is Old is chockablock of authentic, exuberant poems of delight and adoration and loss. Rybicki’s poems of early widowhood, of poet Julie Moulds’s cancer, are gloriously domestic and profound–the straw hats and the stars, the chemo and the cosmos. His rich and unflinching depictions of grief, along with brief passages from Moulds’s writing, tell a true love story through poems.”