Daughter of the Hangnail

Winner of the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award for 1998. Editor's Choice for the Small Press Book Award of 1998. "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 "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' 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