The Failures:
“Why choose success? As Loth says in the moments before his death: “There are only three independent impulses in the human nature! And none of them are to entertain! They are to survive, survive, survive.”
— Jennifer Krasinski, Artforum, 2017
https://www.artforum.com/performance/jennifer-krasinski-on-failure-in-recent-theater-66172
Baltimore Catechism:
“The book provides strange, lyrical and sometimes tongue-in-cheek answers to many of the same questions posed in the original catechism.”
— Colin Dabkowski, Buffalo News, 2013
http://buffalonews.com/2013/03/07/baltimore-catechism-explores-faith-book-arts/
Gonzales:
“Thurber at the top of his skills alongside legendary performance artist Ric Royer, Thurber works from someone else’s script for the first time. A triumph? Yes!”
— http://dominobooks.org/gonzales.html
“Thurber illustrates the satanic panic fantasy of the playwright/performance artist Ric Royer. It’s cool to see Thurber’s very personal style applied to someone else’s story, and the sense of humor and perspective on display here clearly jives well with his sensibilities.”
— https://forums.hipinion.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=62642&start=1860]
The Maids:
“The Maids was cheerfully twisted, elegantly deranged, with confidentially weirdo performances and truly strong vision.”
— Bad Oracle, 2015
https://thebadoracle.com/2015/09/01/the-maids-perv-it-up-cold/
Combs: A Book:
“…is a multitude, a complex engagement with all the languages of the imagination.”
–Michael Basinski
Click for full review
The Weather Not the Weather:
“Ric Royer writes his fictions with the attention to language of a poet and the staging of scene of a playwright. The interplay between syllables and phrasings, between sleep and sex and death, and between he and she creates a new kind of fiction.”
— Michael Kimball
“Words tumble across pages as mesmerizing choreography exploding white space into rhythmic momentum of textual constellations accumulating, poem pushing into poem to create enjambed performance of perspectives, distance, landscapes, time. ‘Even the loveliest things are attended by loss,’ and in Royer’s hypnotic book the presence of what is not there makes itself and makes itself again alongside the erasure of what is. Memories engulf as they darkly slip away, figures become a nothingness refusing to settle into shape or state, and ‘the woods/ seem/ foolish/ beautiful and worthless.”
— Mel Nichols
“Homage, mockery, and compliment, the man/boy who fears death inhabits the aesthetics of himself (and as is the case, his friends) in younger days. Like bathing in a virgin’s blood, “back roads leading/to garbled / sexual advances”, Royer points his hands into your body and makes more than just the mouth move. There is an acceptance in this poem(s) of what is inevitable, showing a maturity, or stoicism, that years of snow reinforce, “even / the loveliest/things are attended/by/loss.”
— Kevin Thurston
Anthesteria:
“Wine writing entering as a dance and a celebration of imagining a festival of flowers and spring, of burgeoning flesh/fresh blossoms new again mythology – in the traditions of the high romance of Shelley and Byron, Ric Royer, a Hermes of the 21th century, weaves wreaths of a re-imagination of the becoming of spring with his Dionysian poetic, and myth skin, veiling and teasing throughout – most ethereal moon worshiping, and where words are born Worbs of wine drink this drunk where poetry begins hovering over and around the silky bulbs pushing blossoms up through the pages of myth.”
— Michael Basinski
