In Womb-Weary, James Ragan writes from the uneasy border between birth and extinction: childhood remembered through Catholic terror, bodies suspended between emergence and disappearance, family history carried less as narrative than as physical residue.

The poems repeatedly return to circles, falling, breath, mothers, unborn or lost children, and the strange violence by which metaphysical ideas enter a child’s ordinary world. Even an icebox, a Coke bottle or a schoolyard game can suddenly open onto damnation.

Ragan’s language is image-dense and incantatory, sometimes almost surreal in the speed of its associations. His poems are interested in how memory distorts chronology—how infancy, death, religion and adult knowledge can occupy the same moment. The result is not confessional poetry in the plainspoken sense, but something more baroque and dream-struck: personal history translated into cosmology. Originally published in 1990, Womb-Weary was Ragan’s third collection and appeared during a period in which his work was moving between American and international literary worlds.

This copy is warmly inscribed and signed by Ragan in 2005, invoking “the memory of Dubrovnik” and the recipient’s humanitarian spirit—a particularly resonant association for a collection so preoccupied with memory, catastrophe and survival.

Birch Lane Press / Carol Publishing Group, New York, 1990. First edition paperback. Author-inscribed and signed on the title page, dated 25 May 2005. Light rubbing, handling marks and edge wear to wrappers; mild corner creasing. Internally clean.