Dog Shows and Church
In “Dog Shows and Church” Donna Reis diverts our intellect using the poet’s slight of hand. Pulling words over us like a tattered woolen blanket of American dream mythology. Luring us with starched white versions of the facts, snapping in the emotional wind, and hung out from the clotheslines of a small town. While lulled by the false simplicity of a child’s perspective sprinkled with gentle humor, the stain of soiled family linens rises out of the closet-through the rose-colored mists of our own inner landscapes. This wrought “sequence of poems” conspires with us, teaching us again and again, by offering large dollops of humanity. She speaks the dangers of living out our lives asleep to life’s truth. Reveling in the beauty of human weakness made tolerable by our ability to love, Donna Reis so moved me by her words, I too pulled out a pair of bloomers in public to wipe my tears.
–Shotsie Gorman, poet / Tattoo Artist
author of The Black Marks He Made
Donna Reis exhibits the limber, omnivorous intelligence of a child as she takes us on a tour of the small town that is this book. Only a poet with sufficient measures of compassion and craft could reveal so deftly the peculiar emotional history of a population in a particular space and time.
It is the news I crave when I read poetry, the “news” Williams felt we needed to hear. Delicate yet vital, I loved this book and read it from cover to cover at first sitting. This is a young poet I always look forward to reading.
–Rick Pernod is the founder and director
of Exoterica, an award winning poetry series
and the head vocalist for the poetry/music
fusion band, House of Pernod. Their first
CD is The Green Hour.”
Incantations
From its sestina about the famine generation in Ireland and its evocations of small-town and rural New York State to its moving elegy entitled “Texas,” these poems are marked by the presence of a sensibility that is inward, warmly empathetic, and, at the same time, capable of deft satire. Gifted in evoking the sense of place and the texture of lives that inhabit it, Donna Reis has written a collection of quietly crafted poems that stays in memory long after it is read.
–Fred Buell
author of Full Summer, Theseus and Other Poems,
and National Culture and the New Global System
From the pictures on Tarot cards, from the lives of historical figures, and from memory Donna Reis creates characters and draws us into their stories. The dreamy quality of many of these poems has nothing to do with obscurity; the dreamscapes of Reis’s poems are real, sensory and immediate. These incantations work their magic with closely observed details, “the necklace of rosary beads (that) ticks against the window,” a woman slipping tortillas’ “doughy tongues in the hearth’s mouth.” Here is a poet who has found her voice and carries us with her into “that stillness/ only lovers and the dying feel/ before they go beyond.”
–Mary Makofske
author of The Disappearance of Gargoyles
Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley
Donna Reis has done an outstanding and compelling job of recording some of the more intriguing tales of celestial spirits who have chosen to carry on their otherworldly lives in the beautiful Warwick Valley of Orange County, New York.
–Monica Randall
author of Phantoms of the Hudson Valley
Donna Reis in her Warwick Valley ghost stories passed my own personal Fright Test: I started reading them one evening in bed and quickly realized I’d have to stop or else sleep with the light on! Continuing in daytime hours, I was charmed by the individuality of each of the stories; all the antique houses, some creepy, some deceptively innocent; the occasionally shocking, always fascinating case histories, and the quirky and colorful characters both living and dead.
–Holly Mascott Nadler
author of Haunted Island: True Ghost Stories from Martha’s Vineyard
Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley is a marvelous collection of ghost tales, sure to send shivers up your spine as you read through its well written pages. In addition, between the lines, Ms. Reis manages to convey the message that, although experiencing a paranormal event can be unsettling, it can also be construed as a comforting message that life does, indeed, go on after death.
–Elaine Mercado, RN
author of Grave’s End