Otherly
2023 Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award
by Rebecca Reynolds
paperback, 120 pages
2025
Reviews
Stephanie Burt on Otherly:
Spectacular, sympathetic, admirably impatient and long in the making, Rebecca Reynolds's third (and best) collection takes us from life-saving queer gardening in New Jersey halfway across the universe, mixing personal odes with speculative flights. One minute she's "smoothing stones beneath the viaduct," "like sky-on-branch / over stiff catalpa pods." Another minute, and she's memorializing vernacular would-be memorials, roadside heights of American Baroque, "a doily glued to a picture frame, a God's Eye taped with plastic flowers." And in another still, she's introspective and yet almost apocalyptic, "tilted and afloat" in a year "after everyone is finally unseen." Could she be our lesbian Dylan Thomas? If you could be, wouldn't you? Go now and see what she can do.
Mary Ruefle on Daughter of the Hangnail:
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.
A Statement from the Author
Through loneliness, through warfare, both past and present, through our experience with COVID 19, the NRA, a history of implicit racism, marriage and queer and childless domesticity, these poems enact the ways in which we may or may not inhabit a unified self provided by our linguistic and cultural modes of explanation or normalization, no matter how domestic and suddenly mainstream our lives have become—though still occurring within bell hooks’s description of a “white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy”. Poetry chronicles the quirks in perception and experience, and this book occurs against this backdrop of fragments and history—how life (and poetry) so often announce themselves.
About the Author
Rebecca Reynolds was born and raised in Washington D.C. She has published two books of poetry, Daughter of the Hangnail and The Bovine Two-Step (New Issues Press). Her first book received the 1998 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Her poems have appeared in several journals, print and online, including Quarterly West, Boston Review of Books, Verse, Cimarron Review, Web Conjunctions, American Letters and Commentary, the Literary Review, The Spoon River Poetry Review, Notre Dame Review, Third Coast, and Journal of New Jersey Poets, among others. She received her BA from Vassar College, an MA in English Literature from Rutgers University, and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She received a Hopwood Award for poetry and a New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant and worked as a dean of advising at Rutgers College-New Brunswick, NJ for 30 years, teaching Creative Writing and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In 2021, she retired from her full-time position at Rutgers to teach Creative Writing, publish a backlog of poems, and write. She lives in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, a patchwork town directly across the Delaware River from Easton, PA with her wife, cats, garden, toads, rabbits, and other wildlife.
