Revenge for Revenge

Poetry. "The apparent velocity of Reynolds's poetry, the physical charges directed into her materials, and the emphatic but relatively spare diction are always believable. Even, or maybe especially, when filtered through what turn out to be surprisingly flexible thematic terms such as revenge and mirage. That elementary principle of organization in any art that nothing gets in anything else's way, and everything is at its own limit of possibilities, is realized, for me, in the way the poems handle intimate immediacy: through a willful, concise, and thoughtfully layered balance of plea and affect."—Anselm Berrigan

"Christie Ann's poems have this brilliant severity about them. Instead of trying to disarm the reader with intimations of easy escape they make false attempts at disentanglement read like a form of existential disavowal, as if the whole world would go flickering out if it had to suffer through another specious evasion. This work refuses that extinguishing completely, delivering against it a charged & complex form of lyric revenge marked by loss, recrimination & resilience."—Dana Ward