spuytenduyvil

Follow Evan Reynolds into [abjections], and you will find yourself in a place that has not been articulated before. In his exploration of madness and critique of the medical-industrial complex, Reynolds stretches and torques the lyric poem far beyond what we’ve known it to do. From the fable to the mirror stanza, [abjections] forges subterranean, conceptual geographies in poetic forms both inhabited and ruined. Informed by the system-building of Foucault and the bodily knowledge of Kristeva, this book is its own brilliant and uncategorizable entity. It is immediacy within grids: horror, repetition, and inscription. It reveals new and breathtaking capacities within the lyric poem.

     —Christina Pugh

 

Evan Reynolds’ poetry of abjection is a propulsive blast of sound, rhythm, heat, pain. Through fertile, propulsive, obsessive language, [abjections] smashes together madness and capital and turns the language of medicalization against itself. Impossible and irresistible, [abjections] breaks open the page to dance our mouths as the words dissolve into symbols and symbols of unspeakable symbols so that we can see ourselves as we are obscured and unseen by others.

     —Daniel Borzutzky

 

Evan Reynolds is destined to be one of the leading poets in mad studies. This book of poetry is filled with great sophistication about madness including the emotions and linguistic sensorium surrounding and immersing distracted states of being. The poetry becomes the very thing it is describing.

     —Lennard Davis