Books
Having Broken, ARE BlazeVOX Books, 2023
With Evelyn Reilly, attention is an active, rather than a passive, force, moving out on beams of language to pierce and participate in the world with an incisive, investigatory care . . . A tour-de-force of presence, Having Broken, Are is an essential book for the contemporary moment. — Cole Swensen, author of Art in Time
Evelyn Reilly's poetry evokes and identifies the very deepest and complex emotions lurking below the surface angst of our crimes against and love for the Earth.— Lyna Hinkel, founder of the climate activist group 350NYC
Styrofoam, Roof Books, 2009
A vast Sargasso sea of plastic fragments the size of a continent has been discovered in the Pacific Ocean. How do we go about living in what Evelyn Reilly defines as “our infinite plasticity prosperity plenitude” and still have room for poetry? Styrofoam might just show us how to do this. It’s a wonderful, mad, challenging itinerary. —John Ashbery
Styrofoam is a piece of functional social anatomy ranging from roadkill to the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, effortlessly sweeping up everything from thermoplastics to cancer cells as if they were the dice tossed by a vast, remote croupier. You don't so much read a book like this as feel it strapped onto your brain like a phantom limb. Reilly's Styrofoam adds its length to the irrigation tubing pioneered by Raymond Queneau's script (in alexandrines) for Resnais' film The Song of Styrene, and Christian Bok's Crystallography—works of a collective and onrushing 'celluloid paranoid cornucopia.'" -—Jed Rasula
Apocalypso, Roof Books, 2012
Evelyn Reilly's Apocalypso floats a cobbled kind of futurist voyage that moves by belief and uncovered loss to quickly deliver an overwhelming sensation (allegory) that as in Tarkovsky's Solaris we are on this journey too and have no hope (and want none) of getting off it. Turning these pages we discover that the museum of the future is a ship and Evelyn Reilly is scribbling our fate." — Eileen Myles
Echolocation, Roof Books, 2018
Echolocation refreshes one's sense of the thrilling necessity of poetry. Dedicated to "all those who navigate by sound in the dark," it is meant for an "us" that includes the whale, the bat, the frog, the river, as well as our multifarious, ardently curious, startlingly ingenious human Selves. Reilly’s tour-de-force opening suite of poems is conducted, with her uniquely grave humor, like a lepidopterist's outing in the Anthropocene: spotting, not netting, paradoxical fragilities of metamorphic selves and echoes of selves attempting to locate one another. –Joan Retallack
This moving book finds the haggard, cartoonish, cathartic, underemployed lyric Self as advance scout, now carrying pelt and scavenging in the Internet rain as “storms of another / Other roll in.” Reilly’s keen senses are electric as she transforms the device of echolocation into the primary means for navigating among the dark fantasies of our moment. These poems bring all of us a little closer to a shared planetary poetics, to “decibels / of the animal,” and to the limit of the Self’s shelf life. —Josh Schuster
Fervent Remnants of Reflective Surfaces, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2006
Hiatus, Barrow Street Press, 2004