"It may not be ‘always true that a good son // dies and a bad one punishes his father by living,’ but what if that’s how it feels, and you’re that son? In the wrenchingly tender poems of So Tall It Ends in Heaven, Jayme Ringleb speaks from the living wound that thrives in the shadow of childhood abandonment; the poems trace the edges of that wound as Ringleb contemplates what it means to have equated a father with God, and to have defined oneself according to the wishes of another: ‘But I thought want was / wooden, simple: whatever He wanted, that’s what I was.’ As they take us through the harrowing ‘garden / of swaying fathers,’ Ringleb’s poems at once confront and enact how the hurt that haunts us has everything to do with how we grow up to love, if we can at all, someone else: brokenly, tentatively, and as if our lives depended on it – as I believe they do. These poems convince me of that. This is a hard-won, triumphant debut."
—Carl Phillips, author of Then the War

"Countless very good first books of poetry enter the world each year, but only a fraction of a fraction are as mature, assured, or ambitiously realized as Jayme Ringleb’s So Tall It Ends in Heaven. A peacock wails, the devil taps at the window, and young boys anoint each other in charcoal. Ringleb possesses that rarest triumvirate fluency of ear, heart, and mind that you find in the great poets of any era, any place—one poem here ends, 'We sleep / in a snarl, like lovers found in snow.' Another, 'It’s almost a heaven, / neglecting you.' It’s thrilling to discover a book you know you’ll revisit for the rest of your life. These poems are better than good—they’re undeniable."
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell