The Girl Who Married the Reindeer

In The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin radically redesigns the language and form of poetic narrative. In poems about journeys to worlds real and metaphorical, she reveals deft crossings of borders, linguistic boundaries, and cultures, from the sepulchre of Lazarus to the web of a spider “who makes her own new centre every day.” Beginning mid-journey, the poems often arrive at mysterious destinations. Throughout the volume, Ní Chuilleanáin displaces the finger posts of narrative which is redefined of a traveler’s productive strayings and even self-exiles: “I follow the road that follows the lie of the land.”