“Strangely musical, oddly broken—this elegant collection scores encounters with cultural history, linguistic detritus, bodily experience, occasional hope. There is virtuosic prosodic achievement on literally every page as well as an enlivening array of the subjects and objects of ‘human cognition,’ generously defined. Plenty of us write a poem because we have ideas; Colleen O’Brien does the harder and rarer thing of materializing ideas because of poems. Reel is at once excitingly melodic, profoundly philosophic, and frequently funny. A truly singular work.” —Hannah Brooks-Motl
“From its opening take on the ‘mind of winter’ through its woozy, last-call singalong to merrily row, Reel is a saccadic inventory of trials to be and to know: ‘no-no-no-no / no.’ In Colleen O’Brien’s bus-eye view, truth and self are amniotic, prone to slip. Her conversations with Judith Butler, with Joyce and Wordsworth, Faulkner and Freud, only help a little here. For ‘we go / closer farther,’ as the world appears to approach and recede at once. O’Brien’s diced, archaic idiolect, in its haptic synaptic poetic scrutiny, becomes a ‘singularity radiance’ by which to see where we are.” —Andrew Zawacki
“The poems in Reel are songs of neither innocence nor experience, but of the Real—terrible like Rilke’s angels—beyond and behind all that. They are at home in the unheimlich, ‘in the frothing ever breeding,’ and their tools are wordplay, fragmentation, and a kind of insistent repetition that lulls and then, at the end of lulling, reveals. They give me the feeling of the ground giving way beneath me, and down I go, into whatever comes before language, or after it, into the ‘Last strange of / all a world // too wide,’ which is the tongue in which these uncanny songs sing.” —Michael Joseph Walsh
“I didn’t mean to be at this party,” writes Colleen O’Brien in Reel, as the reader realizes they too have been absorbed into a spirited, spinning acceleration. In this mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, O’Brien’s shattering sonic sensibility tethers us to the material world via humor while a vibrant commitment to expansive precision moves us “closer farther.” The poems in Reel occupy a liquid, naturalistic desire for language play with Modernist-influenced winks of resistance to absolute cohesion. O’Brien’s wry, sly, kaleidoscopic lines turn mid-word toward surprise, exacting a powerful attention to too-often overlooked beings and images: stones, peas, pearls, rhymes, animals, children. Here is an oblique yet deeply relational poetics: vulnerable, alert, observant.
Colleen O’Brien is the author of the story collection All Roads (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press) and the poetry chapbook Spool in the Maze (New Michigan Press), which won the DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her stories and poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and other journals, and her story “Charlie” won a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Lehigh University.
Contents
I
Seeing
For Now
Scatter
Habilitate
Midas
The Interpretation of Dreams
Ruined Lion
Because We Want
II
Molly
Ergo Ego
Michael Finnegan
Coming Down
Fuel
Bethlehem
Wind Turns Rain
III
Genealogy
Winter
Moving
Envy
The After-Man
Judith Butler
IV
Rich White Guy Gets What He Wants
Saturn
In the Democracy
Bathers by a River
Child Is Father
Consolation to a Friend
All
V
Poem for Your Walk This Morning
He’s in Bed
Postcard
Old Notes
This Time
Reel
Those Are Pearls
