Reviews of Traveling at High Speeds
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“John Rybicki is the kind of poet whose individual poems seem like autobiographical fragments still hurtling apart from some personal Big Bang. His roots are working-class and he’s worked with juvenile delinquents, emotionally impaired children, mentally impaired adults; he’s worked on farms, run a historic grist mill, and tutored in prison. These experiences collide like charged particles in his poems, and yet one senses behind the bursts of fragmentation a unity of perception and deeply considered emotion.“

––Stuart Dybek

“John Rybicki ignites the page. His vital, urgent poems celebrate pleasures some would call—mistakenly—small. Or, as in 'Asthma,' brilliant metaphor underscores the visceral fear of being trapped in one’s own body. I have copied out lines from his poems and kept them on my desk for years; I needed them that close by.”

––Amy Hempel

“John Rybicki has a hurricane-heart, a hammer-heart, that is just waiting to be unleashed upon this perhaps-undeserving world.”

––Rick Bass

“Rybicki is so personally intense that, once, while he was out jogging, he figured out how to finish a poem and was so jazzed that he scratched the poem on the road asphalt with a stone! Buy this book by a frequent contributor to the NAR now that this seven-year-old poetry collection is getting new life—a tribute to Rybicki’s fire and breath.”

–Vince Gotera, North American Review