Echoes of Survival: The Music and Memory of Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground
Rich Ferguson’s Somewhere, a Playground (Moontide Press, 2025) announces itself with a street-level hum. From its opening pages, the collection pulses with the noise and nerve of lived experience — the friction between beauty and brutality that defines much of contemporary urban life. Ferguson, long known as a spoken-word performer and musician, brings his command of sound and rhythm to the printed page, crafting poems that move with the improvisational energy of jazz and the emotional weight of elegy.
At its core, Somewhere, a Playground is a book about survival. The playground of the title is not a site of innocence but of endurance, a place where grief and resilience share the same ground. In these poems, the ghosts of the past coexist with the living: “where bullets haunt playgrounds and bars,” as the publisher’s summary notes, and where “history repeats itself like a jukebox stuck on the same track.” Ferguson refuses to let those repetitions become numbing; instead, he turns them into rhythm, into song. The result is poetry that not only testifies but transforms.
Ferguson’s Los Angeles is both backdrop and character. The city appears in fragments — its streets, sirens, bars, and murals — each rendered with both tenderness and ferocity. Like the Beats before him, Ferguson finds poetry in the unvarnished and the everyday, yet his sensibility is distinctly post-Beat: more diverse, more sonically layered, more attuned to the collisions of race, class, and sound that define twenty-first-century America. His work extends the Beat lineage by fusing it with the spoken-word movement, the energy of performance poetry, and the sensibility of rock and blues.
Music is everywhere in this collection. The poems swing, strum, and howl. They carry the cadence of a live set — verses that demand to be heard aloud. Ferguson’s background in performance is evident not only in the rhythm of his lines but in their physicality. The language has weight; it moves in the body as much as in the mind. In an interview, Ferguson once remarked that “poetry and music are one and the same: both very rhythmic, lyrical, soothing and savage.” Somewhere, a Playground enacts that belief fully. Its poems are savage and soothing, tender and raw.
What makes the book most compelling is its emotional range. Ferguson writes grief without sentimentality, anger without despair. His voice can turn from lament to celebration within a few lines, suggesting that to live honestly in this world is to hold both at once. Even the darkest poems carry a note of hope, the flicker of a playground light refusing to go out. There’s humor here too — wry, self-aware, and deeply human.
If there is a critique to be made, it lies in the relentlessness of the voice. The intensity that gives the work its power can, at times, crowd out moments of quiet reflection. Readers seeking meditative stillness might find little pause between Ferguson’s surges of sound and image. Yet even that relentlessness feels true to the world the poems inhabit: a city that never quite stops moving, a memory that never stops echoing.
In the landscape of contemporary American poetry, Somewhere, a Playground stands out as a testament to the enduring conversation between the page and the stage. It embodies a kind of hybrid poetics—part street corner, part concert hall, part cathedral of memory. Ferguson reminds us that poetry need not whisper to be profound; it can shout, sing, and still reach the heart.
Ultimately, this is a book about presence — the persistence of art, of memory, of human voice in the face of loss. It asks us to listen closely to the places where sorrow and joy meet, where the playground becomes both elegy and anthem. For readers and poets alike, Somewhere, a Playground is not merely a collection to read but to hear, to feel, and to carry forward.
Somewhere, a Playground is available from Moon Tide Press at https://www.moontidepress.com/books.
While a resident of New York City, Richard Modiano became active in the literary community connected to the Poetry Project where he came to know Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, William S. Burroughs and Ted Berrigan. In 2001 he was a programmer at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center, joined the Board of Trustees in 2006, and from 2010 to 2019, he served as Executive Director. The Huffington Post named him as one of 200 people doing the most to promote poetry in the United States. Modiano is the winner of the 2022 Joe Hill Prize for labor poetry and is a Pushcart Prize nominee.
