Drawing Words is available through Finishing Line Press.
These poems celebrate the miraculous resilience in the love of two sisters, a bond that allows both young women to survive the nightmare of domestic violence and the trials of adulthood with unwavering grace. To read these poems is to undergo a vicarious baptism into the waters of deep love and commitment, and the comfort of knowing one's true home.
– Alison Luterman, author of In the Times of Great Fires and Desire Zoo
Boxing Without Gloves, Barb Reynolds' first chapbook, is remarkable for its understated and beautiful narratives. I am reminded of Raymond Carver, whose poems became, in and of themselves, metaphors. Barb Reynolds has this grace, this ease, this command of a language full of the concrete, full of things: plastic gnomes, hummingbirds, fists, jasmine, mangoes, and shiny black shoes. That this poet hones in on the physical and the concrete is fitting, because here - from the heart-breaking recollection of a visit to a father in prison to the poem for a lover with skin of "vanilla and ground ginger" - is a speaker who is very aware of the ways in which language fails us: naming the world is an act of survival. These are not easy poems to read because they are about what matters - love, loss, illness, betrayal - which means everything is at stake. We are all, as Barb Reynolds reminds us, finding our way home "in the dark." How lucky we are that we have her poems to carry with us.
Jude Nutter, author of The Curator of Silence and
I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman
