Having Broken, ARE by Evelyn Reilly

With Evelyn Reilly, attention is an active, rather than a passive, force, moving out on beams of language to pierce and participate in the world with an incisive, investigatory care. Often wry, slightly biting, this work locates the more subtle pressure points of our current world, intersections where the fabric is starting to wear thin. She also, and equally unwaveringly, locates its beauty, illuminating it through stunning lines that direct the reader’s attention toward a similarly active participation. A tour-de-force of presence, this is an essential book for the contemporary moment.
— Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time

Guided by the movement of trees and the knowledge of their behavior, Reilly’s soft and fierce sequence of poems begins in liminal nighttime reflections that blend knowledge-language of trees with a language of flickering presence. Taken together, the poems of Having Broken, Are instigate a poiesis of “a new kind of intimacy” in the human and aesthetic relation to “the half-destroyed everywhere.” This intimacy becomes a critical guide to present and historical, synchronic and diachronic, questions of aesthetics and particularly the “aesthetics of detachment,” which the poet counters with a vision of the world, however broken, that Reilly’s trees show we live in now.
— Carla Harryman, author of Sue in Berlin

Here we are, grimly aware of catastrophic anthropogenic damage to this planet yet still living and even loving our small, ordinary lives. These skewed scales collide and intertwine in Evelyn Reilly’s powerful volume whose vibrant minimalism will fill you with grief and gratitude. Bringing to bear savvy humor and striking clarity of perception, Reilly contemplates dangerous contaminants and corrupted language even as she aligns us more hopefully with “the mute unfurl / of living things taking / their chances again.”
— Lynn Keller, author of Recomposing Ecopoetics: North American Poetry of the Self-Conscious Anthropocene

Evelyn Reilly’s poetry evokes and identifies the very deepest and complex emotions lurking below the surface angst of our crimes against and love for the Earth.
— Lyna Hinkel, founder of the climate activist group 350NYC

Evelyn Reilly is a New York-based poet, scholar, and environmentalist. Her books include Styrofoam, Apocalypso and Echolocation, published by Roof Books, Hiatus, published by Barrow Street Press, and the chapbook Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces from Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. Her poetry has appeared in many anthologies and is also included in the Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene, a multimedia compendium of work by scientists, thinkers, poets and artists produced by the Stanford Digital Publishing Initiative. She is a member of the Steering Committee of the climate activist group 350NYC.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 94 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-449-9

$18

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