“The poems that comprise this enviable collection are unflinching and fearless, crafting new definitions for the definition of woman—as mother, as lover, as flawed and singular being. Donna Vorreyer has written these revelatory verses from the caverns of her own body—her commitment to the breath of each stanza is formidable. And that’s why this book is unforgettable.”
—Patricia Smith
“Vorreyer writes, ‘Who cares if the night is blind / its white eye plucked and hooded?’ yet these brave, sometimes elegiac poems are about caring, about how one goes on even when the weight of intense feeling is crippling. Desire, loss, the humble and glorious body, the great subjects of what it means to be human are deftly exfoliated in these poems of disassemblage and re-creation.”
—Laura McCullough
“‘I have a need to carry things,’ says the speaker in Donna Vorreyer’s A House of Many Windows, a Millay-like sequence on longing—not for a lover, but for a child she can’t have. Fiercely, she enlists poetry to conceive her tie to the unborn—’My uncoupled sonnet, my comma / splice. Forgive the mediocre world, / ill-versed in our intimate literacy’—and to the boy she will eventually adopt and raise. Such mysterious and steadfast love makes Vorreyer’s poems part of a wider narrative, having to do with human connection at its core—as something way, way thicker than blood.”
—Diana Goetsch