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

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.

A conversation with Kevin Ridgeway about A Growing Pain I Still Can’t Kill will appear in The Small Run, the occasional newsletter from Analog Submission Press.

—

EDITION DETAILS
· Limited edition of 26 copies
· 20 copies numbered for sale
· 148 × 148 mm
· Saddle-stitched
· Printed on recycled, uncoated stock
· Launches 17 June 2026
· Pre-orders start 8 June 2026

—

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.

—

POSTAGE & DELIVERY
Orders are sent via standard or tracked services depending on the option selected at checkout. Tracked orders include delivery confirmation. Delivery times vary by destination. International orders may be subject to customs delays.

—

PRE-ORDER NOTE
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.

Pre-orders will dispatch from the stated release date.