TIGER UPSTAIRS ON CONNECTICUT AVENUE is the perfect title for Elisavietta Ritchie"s new collection: roaring, juxtaposing the outrageous and the mundane, and leaving nothing from her omnivorous imagination. "...reading some of her poems is akin to watching a wick sizzle down on a firecracker, waiting for the pop, the smoke, and the final hiss...Whether looking through the scrim into death, or looking back through history at her own family, I imagine Ritchie to be some mad cheerleader for passion, stealing blackberries, loving a dying friend, or recuperating from a bad mushroom trip, all the while refusing to give up, to be satiated... . Life and death. Passion and its opposite, her touchstones...that give her voice power; after all "like fire, when we no longer burn, we die."--Scott Whitaker