NEW RELEASE
TOROHILL
Torohill is a house, and poetry collection, of generations and regenerations. It is written with indomitable spirit, seriousness and self-deprecating humor, for navigating feelings and overcoming griefs. The house is up hill from a tragic accident that shattered and redirected the poet’s life, eventually transporting her across its threshold to a brief yet enduring love with her second husband. With verve, levity and depth, Donna Reis follows Rilke’s imperative at the start of this book, to “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” —Amy Holman
Read a review of Torohill by John M. Bellinger
Chapbook Editor, The Comstock Review
In praise of Torohill
“Make it honest,” a poetry teacher once urged, and Donna Reis’s poems perfectly embody both the honesty and the making of this imperative. Out of the wreck and ruin, out of the breaks and pains that constitute the tragic comedy of our ordinary lives, Reis crafts poems of extraordinary tenderness and resilience, which are grounded in an abiding love. These are poems made to savor and to share. " - Jeanne Marie Beaumont
More Praise for Torohill
Donna Reis’s gift for mapping the irony, hurt, love and loss of her geography is given its best expression in Torohill. Firmly rooted in the real, the collection is ever mindful of the unseen, the super real presiding over human frailty, knowing [we could be taken] at any moment, and …the stars wouldn’t say a word. And while deer, fox, owls, and coyotes inhabit the woods and fields of the ancestral farm that lends the book its title, they are out-numbered by ghosts that walk in soft swales of lawn where No one notices you let yourself in…[as you follow] the sound of a radio broadcasting in an office―FDR? Even the poet’s ghost is here - hit by a car at the base of the driveway at seventeen. Is the location of Reis’s life-defining auto accident at the foot of the drive to her future husband’s home unimaginable coincidence or illusion? It is Real! as is the brilliance of the words on the page, imbued with Reis’s characteristic wit, that give order in Torohill to life’s seemingly unassuageable tragedy.
―Janet Hamill
Each poem in this well-wrought collection acts as a memory-crumb in a trail through a landscape of leave-takings; sadly, the trail ends in a series of beautifully restrained poems about the death of Reis’ husband. While the predominant theme may be loss, Reis’ sense of humor and her playfulness with language fill the poems with life.
―Teresa Carson
Poets, preachers, and financial consultants all find themselves in periods of bereavement— soldiers recruited into a vast human army. They never volunteer. The life hurts too much. To chronicle its days and nights requires a poet of accuracy, restraint, sensuality, and humor. Her language must be versatile, attuned to the gaiety of a holiday party, the mischief of a pet, silly necessities like “Woolite and Miracle Whip” and the intimate heartbreak of “The Last Night.” Donna Reis deploys the words and rhythms of that language in poems that will lift the spirits of all drudging soldiers.
―Sarah White, author of Iridescent Guest (Deerbrook Editions, 2020)
MORE TITLES BY DONNA REIS
No Passing Zone
“Lyrical, wry, biting—Reis uses all the tricks in her deck to show how to survive the pain and healing of the body, the crumbling and restoration of houses, the razing and rebuilding of love. There’s serious word play here, and a sharp eye for detail. Reis explores not only her own experience, but the lives of others—Dorothy Wordsworth ministering to her brother, Mary Lamb, whose “Kitchen rattled / toward me, its knives hissing . . .” Readers will rejoice at the perseverance of this poet, who “stayed because [she had] more stories to tell.”
—Mary Makofske
Deerbrook Editions, 2015
Reviewed in American Book Review
Certain
“A collection to savor, Donna Reis‘s spirited, tender, droll, and haunted lyric poems spin an inverted fairy tale where lovers are middle-aged and battle-tough, but also burnished to a sheen reflecting compassion, tolerance, and a dry, enduring humor. Old enough to know life seldom unfolds as we expect–they have learned to love the unexpected and their compatible quirks; his “melancholy nostalgia,” her eye-rolling. They have learned to entertain and embrace their ghosts, and to rescue each other with a mature, certain love.” –April Ossmann
Finishing Line Press, 2012
DOG SHOWS AND CHURCH
“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, founder and director of Exoterica, an award winning poetry series.
Eurydice Press, 2000
Seeking Ghosts in the Warwick Valley
These stories will make you bolt you doors and sleep with the lights on. Beloved as a pastoral paradise by weekenders and vacationers, beautiful Warwick, New York, is a historic town that boasts of bucolic diary farms, gingerbread Victorian homes, and winding back roads that lead to scenic hamlets and villages. An artists community has grown up in the area, inspired by the natural beauty of the surroundings. However, all is not perfect in this Paradise.
Schiffer Publishing, 2003
BLUES FOR BILL
Blues for Bill celebrates the life and work of the poet William Matthews through his own language, that of poetry. While poems of William Matthews are well known and remembered, this collection of poems ensures that the world will remember Bill himself: his graciousness, intelligence, knowledge, style, good humor, capacity for friendship, immense talent, and wit. The poems included were written by people who knew Bill in a variety of ways, under myriad circumstances; as friend, both old and new; as mentor and teacher; as colleague; as father. The poems are remarkable, true testaments to Bill and his art. —The Editors
University of Akron Press, 2005
Incantations
“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 Richard Snyder Award publication, Traction
Eurydice Press
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