Recently my debut poetry book, the other body, has received some good reviews. I’m really glad to know that it has connected with readers so far, and it’s fascinating to see the different facets and interpretations that people are picking up on.
Reviewing the other body on his blog, Billy Mills notices the search for a sense of wholeness, and (to my delight) engages with the use of Welsh language and myth in the book. Billy writes:
Reynolds’ work here is profoundly ecopoetic, an attempt to integrate the world in verse. […] This is my first encounter with their work, and I look forward to more.
You can read the rest of Billy’s review here.
Jennifer A. McGowan remarks on themes of bodies, love and divinity in Sphinx. She writes:
These are natural, scientific bodies, but the reader feels (at times uncomfortably) as if it’s their own body, too. The ‘you’ of ‘Hello Stranger’ becomes the ‘stranger of clay and cloth’, attempting to love — to make love, to construct it and examine it — in the forest. Doing so, the poet draws the reader (‘you’) into her poetic ‘I’; acknowledges the reader as an other, necessary, body.
You can read the rest of Jennifer’s review here.
Big thanks to both Billy and Jennifer for taking the time to share their readings of my book. the other body is available from Guillemot Press, and if you’d like to read it you can buy it here.
Flo Reynolds 