A Growing Pain I Still Can’t Kill by Kevin Ridgeway

About the book

A Growing Pain I Still Can’t Kill gathers poems of family, grief, prison visits, Southern California childhood, addiction, illness, and the difficult mercy of survival. Kevin Ridgeway writes with blunt tenderness, black humour, and an eye for the small details that carry the whole weight of a life: collect calls, vending machine dinners, old cars, Christmas photographs, visitor passes, cats, cigarettes, and the voice of a dead mother that refuses to fall silent.

These poems move between childhood memory and adult reckoning, between the mother who is gone and the father still alive behind prison walls. What emerges is a collection about damage, forgiveness, and the strange persistence of love after everything that should have ended it.

Edition details

• Catalogue: ASP 005
• Published: 17 June 2026
• Edition: 26 copies
• Copies for sale: 20, numbered by hand
• Format: Small square, 148 × 148 mm
• Extent: 52 pages
• Binding: Saddle-stitched
• Interior: 100 gsm recycled uncoated paper
• Cover: 250 gsm recycled natural stock
• Production: Designed, printed, assembled, numbered, and stamped by Analog Submission Press in York

About the author

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press), Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press), and Death of the Coppertone Girl (Luchador Press). His work has appeared in Hiram Poetry Review, New York Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Gargoyle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Heavy Feather Review, San Pedro River Review, and Trailer Park Quarterly, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, California.

The Small Run

Read a conversation with Kevin Ridgeway about family grief, prison visits, black humour, and the small details that hold a life together in The Small Run 005.