Unrivered, Donna Vorreyer
“A new shore for this salvage.
I salvage a self, unrivered.”
Donna Vorreyer strikes gold with Unrivered, a stunning collection of poems that meditate on grief, regret, longing, self-love, and acceptance. Reeling from the loss of her parents, Vorreyer’s speaker is forced to grapple with her own mortality, and with the complicated feelings that come with aging. At times whispering softly in our ears, at times spitting venom with every word, Vorreyer charts the ways loss impacts the body and our perceptions of self, and how we are to keep on living. With a heroic sonnet crown woven through the book like the loose stitches in her grandmother’s quilt, Vorreyer offers hope, courage, and gratitude in the face of our deepest fears. The result is a masterful and gripping story of loss and acceptance. Offering up rending, apocalyptic elegy, ironic detachment, or passionate, joyful celebration of life, Unrivered is bound to both take your breath away and give it a new form.
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Women of a certain age, myself included, are in a perpetual hissy-fit—torn between being grateful to God/the world/Mother Nature for keeping us around for so long, and incensed because the road to our end is often so sudden, sapping, saggy, and brutal. Unrivered is the consummate soundtrack for that exasperating in-between. These poems, crafted with enviable prosodic skill and irrepressible sass, pull back the curtain to show the tears, flailing fists, bared teeth, and weary defiance of one particular over-sixty, who refuses to age obediently. With a stunning sonnet crown at its core and lean stanzas that balance hurt and humor, this is a book to be read again and again. You’ll quote these lines to your young oblivious friends. Unrivered is the revelation that comes after grief. It raises the wounded but adamant voices of those who fight against disappearing
—Patricia Smith, author of The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems
Unrivered begins with a green field, and guides us through a remarkable journey of expressive power and vulnerability. I’m so grateful for this balm—this impassioned reckoning of the body and the outdoors.
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Bite by Bite
Pensive, playful, and richly layered, Donna Vorreyer’s Unrivered flows with vivid embodiment and deep imagination through aubades, sonnets, prose poems, and erasures to examine the rhythms of youth and age, motion and rest, abundance and emptiness. With wit and clarity, this book reveals the surrender and acceptance that aging, especially aging as a woman, requires, and lauds the new self that emerges within the inevitability of change. As much a commemoration of mistakes and failures as it is a celebration of beauty and endurance, each poem here is an enchantment, the “little magic beneath a crescent moon” a person gets to perceive if they stick around long enough.
–Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows
If there is anything we need in this moment, it is unwavering evidence of what isn’t terrible or cruel. Donna Vorreyer leads us by the hand from the noisy, news-ridden world into the muted quiet of the forest, a quiet in which we can finally hear ourselves. I feel like an intruder in these poems, poems in which the speaker considers the aging body, how it’s constantly poked and prodded both literally and figuratively, how it can never escape critique, even self-criticism. But the body persists, the body operates on its own accord, the body wants and hungers even when we fail to love it—“neither age / nor breakage / quells desire.” Vorreyer is formally masterful, particular and intimate in her bodily inspections. You will come away from this book with a new understanding of your body. You will put this book down and want to hold yourself instead.
—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, Winner of the 2023 Maya Angelou Book Award