To Everything There Is, Donna Vorreyer

Sometimes with softness, sometimes with teeth, this book of poems will startle you with glimpses into the life of someone who has been smothered with emptiness after loss. Donna Vorreyer’s To Everything There Is unplugs every gaping hole inside the body to confront the inner turmoils, aches of desire, and tangles of sin simmering inside. While struggling through faith and journeying into a fantastical world to deal with grief, these poems question what there is to life other than discovering death’s soft humming. Yet, even at the lowest point, where one might, “slice at the swell of the skin’s blue-green river,” there is something to hope for. Although we may encounter dark roads in our lives, Vorreyer pushes us toward self-acceptance, resilience, and love—toward the beauty of life. And whether the voices in the poems are preening their feathers and coming to a rebirth, or finding somewhere or someone to belong to, To Everything There Is will have you longing to make the time you have left, “lit by some sort of fire.”

“In To Everything There Is by Donna Vorreyer, we travel into the details of life, death, and grief with an observer’s eye through a place where, as the poet writes, ‘there is no handbook, no map.’ These tender, honest, and incredibly moving poems pull us into a story where what is holy is all around us, where Vorreyer’s words are ‘blending all the broken parts together/in a silhouette that resembles prayer.’ Well-crafted and unafraid to share beauty with bereavement, these poems help us to endure the times we think we can’t. It is a skillful poet who can recognize the grief, and through poetry, carve light where loss was.”
—Kelli Russell Agodon, author of Dialogue with Rising Tides

“How to describe Donna Vorreyer’s To Everything There Is—elegy, love poem, dirge, ode, lament? It is all of these, as the poet traces through a season of loss, the throes of aging, and the warm and well-lit rooms of a long and much cherished love. That Vorreyer crafts all of this into a collection that is both so burdened with grief and buoyant with joy makes To Everything There Is the most human of utterances. That she does so with formal dexterity and a radiant love of language makes the collection so much more than testimony. Instead, these poems are ‘lanterns / not flashlights. Sea glass / but not the sea.’ They are a finely honed and poignant guide for ‘a new rowing across an old world.’”
—Molly Spencer, author of If the House

“As Donna Vorreyer’s masterfully crafted, music-rich poems traverse the often disquieting and anguish-heavy terrain of aging, illness, and death—particularly that of her late parents—they remind us of our own mortality, of the ‘winless war’ of survival. ‘Somewhere in my future, my death hums / toward me in a ghostly fog,’ Vorreyer writes, speaking on behalf of all living things. But instead of allowing herself, or the rest of us, to descend into despair, To Everything There Is grants our hearts the chance to be pried open with sorrow, generously filled with vast stores of compassion and courage, then sewn shut with such tenderness that we find ourselves feeling not only more alive, more able to brave the tolls of time, but also more forgiving of our imperfect selves, our countless frailties.”
—Faisal Mohyuddin, author of The Displaced Children of Displaced Children