“I didn’t mean to be at this party,” writes Colleen O’Brien in Reel, as the reader realizes they too have been absorbed into a spirited, spinning acceleration. In this mesmerizing debut collection of poetry, O’Brien’s shattering sonic sensibility tethers us to the material world via humor while a vibrant commitment to expansive precision moves us “closer farther.” The poems in Reel occupy a liquid, naturalistic desire for language play with Modernist-influenced winks of resistance to absolute cohesion. O’Brien’s wry, sly, kaleidoscopic lines turn mid-word toward surprise, exacting a powerful attention to too-often overlooked beings and images: stones, peas, pearls, rhymes, animals, children. Here is an oblique yet deeply relational poetics: vulnerable, alert, observant. 

Praise for Reel:

“Plenty of us write a poem because we have ideas; Colleen O’Brien does the harder and rarer thing of materializing ideas because of poems. A truly singular work.” —Hannah Brooks-Motl

“O’Brien’s diced, archaic idiolect, in its haptic synaptic poetic scrutiny, becomes a ‘singularity radiance’ by which to see where we are.” —Andrew Zawacki

“The poems in Reel are… at home in the unheimlich, “in the frothing ever breeding,” and their tools are wordplay, fragmentation, and a kind of insistent repetition that lulls and then, at the end of lulling, reveals.” —Michael Joseph Walsh

Bio:

Colleen O’Brien is the author of the story collection All Roads (TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press) and the poetry chapbook Spool in the Maze (New Michigan Press), which won the DIAGRAM chapbook contest. Her full-length poetry collection, Reel, will be published by the Cleveland State University Poetry Center. Her stories and poems have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Fence, Kenyon Review Online, The Antioch Review, Denver Quarterly, West Branch, and other journals, and her story “Charlie” won a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at Lehigh University.