“Haunted by sinuous love and death’s resounding presence, Donna Vorreyer finds a ‘language for this / ache.’ Her poems magnify experience into wonderment, longing. Her startling imagery reveals an imagination that braids the actual and the magical. Time and again I was struck by linguistic pleasures. In one poem, corn silk becomes a gown. In another, the speaker says, ‘the moon has no / hands to catch me.’ Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story is a riveting collection that reminds us love and grief, like fire and water, are elemental forces that summon both sorrow and song.”
—Eduardo Corral
“Love, that dark song married to footsteps, is pulled between ecstatic fulfillment and loss in Vorreyer’s poems. With her gift for indelible images—a blood-red heaven, a hand on a lover’s ribs like a harpist, a white whale painted on a beloved’s lips—Vorreyer creates the sensual portents for a doomed desire. The body and its pleasures constantly manifests in new and surprising ways, and with those new delights, something more to lose. This love and its inevitable ending, how I feasted on it.”
—Traci Brimhall
“‘Hidden in the stalks, crickets sing. / I rub my thighs together in bold / commiseration,’ Donna Vorreyer writes in ‘Bringing in the Sheaves.’ ‘A thousand ears / listen for answers that do not come.’ In her deeply engaging collection, Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story, Vorreyer maps a landscape embedded with loss. ‘I can go months and not miss you,’ one speaker admits, ‘then a bowl of guacamole will break me.’ These poems supersede elegy—they are more darkly funny and discerning than that—and become instead a personal eschatology, celebrating the world even as we examine how it ends.”
—Sandra Beasley