The fifth title from Analog Submission Press in 2026 is Kevin Ridgeway’s A Growing Pain I Still Can’t Kill.

This collection gathers poems of family, grief, prison visits, Southern California childhood, addiction, illness, and the mercy of survival. Kevin Ridgeway writes with directness and straight up blunt tenderness, black humour, and an eye for the small details that bring together the weight of a life. There are collect calls, old cars, visitor passes, vending machine dinners, cats, cigarettes, Christmas photographs, and the voice of a dead mother that refuses to go silent.

In this conversation, Ridgeway talks about grief, humour, prison visits, family memory, and the challenge of writing material for a small, physical edition.

The chapbook opens with “Things my Mother Would Say to Me if She Was Still Alive” and closes with “Things I Would Say to my Mother if She Was Still Alive.” Did those two poems arrive as bookends from the beginning, or did the structure of the collection find its way later?

The structure of the collection found its way after the genesis of those two poems, but it was an idea of mine to frame a collection with those poems once I had the right amount of work to complement the bookends.

There’s a great deal of grief in this collection, but it rarely settles into sentimentality. The poems often embrace humour, irritation, bluntness, and embarrassment. How important is humour when you write about family, death, and pain?

It’s developed into something important to me—it’s a common thread in my work. I like my poems to explore difficult things, but it would be inauthentic of me and also a burden to my readers if I didn’t lace these heavy themes with a little light. I tend to really go for it when it comes to exposing vulnerable aspects of life, but I try to add humour to give my poems a fuller scope of human emotion.

The title phrase appears in “Emergency Contact List,” where your mother’s death becomes “a growing pain / I still can’t kill.” What made that line feel like the centre of the chapbook?

It took a while for me to arrive at a title. That poem seemed to provide one of the bridges to the collection, as it juggles many of the themes present in the rest of the chapbook. I’m still evolving and growing, as a poet and as a person, processing trauma and still tending to the wounds. The line in that poem really seemed to fit what’s going on here, that Kevin Ridgeway is finally starting to grow up.

Your mother is present through absence, memory, photographs, cigarettes, cats, Christmas, and the kind of advice that still seems to speak after death. When you write about her now, do you feel you are preserving her, arguing with her, or trying to hear her more clearly?

I’m doing all three, really. The longer she’s been gone, the more interested I have been in talking to her with the perspective I have today. I try to honour her by continuing to discover her and who she was in life as well as in my writing.

Your father appears throughout the collection as an incarcerated man, a voice on the phone, a body in a wheelchair, a criminal figure, and a source of love. How difficult is it to maintain all of those versions of him in the same poem?

It’s taken a long time for me to reach that point in my work. My poems about my father used to be only about the dark aspects of him and his life. I’ve begun to embrace the many dimensions he carries, as we’ve become closer and I’ve learned to forgive him.

Several poems return to prison spaces. There are collect calls, visitor passes, vending machines, Scrabble tiles, security checkpoints, and the visiting room at Chino. What draws you to those small institutional details, and do they help you get closer to the emotional truth of the relationship?

I’ve been visiting prisons all my life. Going on these recent visits to reconcile my relationship with my father has given me the opportunity to reflect on the gravity of even the smallest details of the situation, which do help me get closer to the emotional truth of the relationship. I’ve kept it very simple with those poems, as very little beyond the details needs to be said.

In “When my Father Was Behind the Wheel,” cars become a way of remembering your father: El Camino, Ranchero, Cadillac, Honda Civic. What makes certain objects become emotional containers in your work?

Cars are an essential aspect of my father’s personality. They literally drive into my poems like they’re being pursued by some kind of emotional police force. Certain objects inspire poems to be built around them, like cars on assembly lines. Just the mention of “El Camino” makes me nostalgic and ready to pick up a pen.

The childhood poems have a vivid Southern California feel. There are strip malls, hot concrete, overgrown lawns, Christmas rooms, old cars, and citrus pulp in the gutters. How much does place shape the emotional life of these poems?

My goal is to create an environment for the reader that is vivid — I believe in writing what you know, and I like to give a cinematic view of my world as much as I possibly can. I want the reader to be able to smell the citrus and to sense the desolation, to be able to envision where the poems live.

There’s a tension throughout the chapbook between damage and tenderness. The poems recognise the violence, addiction, illness, and failure, but they keep returning to love. Do you think poetry allows you to forgive, or does it simply let you look more directly?

It allows me to do both, to understand and reveal the truth of my situation to myself and to develop empathy enough to forgive what happened in the past. Love wins at the end of the day for me, no matter how ugly the day was.

This is a small, physical, limited chapbook, and the poems feel intensely compressed. There is childhood, grief, prison visits, family memory, and survival. Does the chapbook form change how you think about emotional weight, sequence, and what a collection can leave unsaid?

It changes all of that for me and offers a rewarding challenge to spotlight work of mine with meticulous consideration to the limited amount of space and a sequence that brings about the greatest impact to the overall theme of the collection.

A Growing Pain I Still Can’t Kill is available in a limited edition of 20 numbered copies.

Pre-orders are open now.

Pre-orders include four A6 mini broadsides featuring cover artwork from Kevin Ridgeway’s previous Analog Submission Press chapbooks — Smile Until You’re Alive Enough to Be Dead, Grandma Goes to Rehab, Girls! Girls! Girls!, and The Purple Crayon Poems. Printed on assorted coloured card stock. Reverse is blank, hand-stamped with the Analog Submission Press mark.

Launches 17 June.

Pre-order here →