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Forthcoming: Otherly, 42 Miles Press, 2025
Daughter of the Hangnail, Rebecca Reynolds
New Issues Press, 1997
The Bovine Two-Step, Rebecca Reynolds, New Issues Press, 2002
Winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, 1998
Winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, 1998
Editor’s Choice for the Small Press Book Award of 1998
Editor’s Choice for the Small Press Book Award of 1998
“These poems move bravely forward and conjure the mood of a long Stevensian walk through a post-industrial town at twilight, a town that has seen better times, a town full of houses and apartments where people can be seen in lit rooms, gathered around tables and televisions, trying in very different ways, to collate their experience after a day of labor. … The book is full of – dare I say it? – eternal questions, and if we are reminded poetry is a good house in a bad neighborhood, making beauty a logistical error, we are also made aware it has stood there for a very long time and is in no danger of falling down or being torn down, so long as poets like Reynolds are given stewardship of this strange conundrum called poetry.”
—from the foreword by Mary Ruefle
This fun, bracingly smart first collection balances speculative epistemologies against surprising, seen things, panning from incident ("man discovered with over 700 birds") to remote tangent: "his poor head, startled, / the way a floorplan is startled with wings." Reynolds's comparisons propose and test definitions of self, pain, meaning: "The heart–/ a canned tulip– / cannot bear itself. And the mind's light masonry/houses a crap shoot, waterlit." She enjoys syncopated catalogs, aposiopeses, and "I am X, I am Y" conceits; her digressive, skittering lines mix traces of Clampitt and Graham with traces of "cool": "I had to book it with the f_____g diapers. Lost, // I might add, like a tune from God." Among many poets with similar projects, Reynolds stands out for her sharp juxtapositions, for her generous empathies, and for her sometimes-exceptional ear: "We are turning / cans and fenders into rust in the yard / and scrub in the umber ground."
–Stephen Burt, Boston Review, Oct. 1998
“Rebecca Reynolds’ stunning first collection constantly surprises and delights us with its taut meditations. Never glib, Reynolds is by turns lucid, lyrical, reflectively ironic, wittily bittersweet—a frequency/fixed in the complex” (“The Naive Bones”). Daughter of the Hangnail presents us with a brilliant, new voice that cannot be missed!”
—Cynthia Hogue
“Rebecca Reynolds’ poems are leavened by a good strangeness; they infuse the everyday with wonder and music. Whether she writes of perception or relationships, Reynolds maps the singular emotional terrain that comprises the self. Her work—more ontology than confession—exists where Rilke’s glowing harmonics meet the raw edge of the millennium. Her exquisitely elliptical lyrics are founded on an intelligence as shimmering as it is convincing.”
—Alice Fulton
“Rebecca Reynolds is that rare type of poet, a sensuous philosopher. Each poem in this luminous collection discovers, that is, breaks through to new perceptions, new paths of thinking, new ways of saying. Reynolds creates rich, deftly stratified poems of memory, cognition, and feeling that are as transformative of the language as they are transportive for the reader. These poems are victories over the ordinary, the easy, the dulled, and excel at doing what we need poetry to do––they awaken, resuscitate.”
—Jeanne Marie Beaumont
Daughter of the Hangnail, winner of the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award by the Poetry Society of America. Judge Ann Lauterbach's citation: Good poetry is never about categories like "first" or "woman" or "youth." So: for the variety of its interests and sources, for the musicality of its lines, the clarity and diversity of its diction and for the high value it places on the idea of poetry, I chose Rebecca Reynolds' Daughter of the Hangnail for this prize.
In her daring first book, Rebecca Reynolds kindles ordinary moments into signal flares of ecstasy--"flourescent funk from the stars" (32). Her alchemy is the insomniac's synesthesia, those quiet shifts in perpective--sight sliding into touch, sound echoing into vision--that mark the edge of sleep, where we "inhale onyx," wake to "liquid sheets" and "touch the red fizzle of morning" (46,37,53). By confusing the senses, these poems paradoxically achieve a sudden clearness, charting with precision a body that yearns to be "flinging identity in a dark curve through the peripheral trees" (29). In an afflicted world in which bodies have become "mere reverberations" (49), these poems ask us to imagine the reverse--the self as a mere reverberation or description of the body. A lucid but lyrical theorist of the emotions, Reynolds unflinchingly confronts the sensuous condition of being alone, and especially the common loneliness of women. The dazzling experiment of these poems is to trabsform a sometimes ravishing loneliness into "new hypotheses of permanence and home" (37). Despite their thorough investigation of the word "alone," Reynolds' poems beckon "Outside"--even to the reader in her armchair--achkowledging "your beauty, the singing birds in their armchair of song" (50). Read this book if you can welcome "the disturbances, especially joy" (49).
New Issues/Western Michigan University
In her second volume, Reynolds explores interior exchanges between sound and sense: the seductions of language, the fund of sensual experience, informal feeling versus the logic of the world, and the desire for the imaginary as opposed to a reliance on public truths, to that which occurs within “census-drawn depths.”
In The Bovine Two-Step, Reynolds tests delineations between interior and exterior worlds, between self and world. The poems address these distinctions, often wrestling with the blur that results from their mingling. The revelations in these poems are small and quiet and open to questioning, and that is our human business.
Contact: rebecca.reynolds533@gmail.com
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