Reviews of Daughter of The Hangnail
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"Rebecca Reynolds is that rare type of poet, a sensuous philosopher. Each poem in this luminous collection discovers, that is, breaks through to new perceptions, new paths of thinking, new ways of saying. Reynolds creates rich, deftly stratified poems of memory, cognition, and feeling that are as transformative of the language as they are transportive for the reader. These poems are victories over the ordinary, the easy, the dulled, and excel at doing what we need poetry to do––they awaken, resuscitate."

–Jeanne Marie Beaumont

"Rebecca Reynolds' poems are leavened by a good strangeness; they infuse the everyday with wonder and music. Whether she writes of perception or relationships, Reynolds maps the singular emotional terrain that comprises the self. Her work—more ontology than confession—exists where Rilke's glowing harmonics meet the raw edge of the millennium. Her exquisitely elliptical lyrics are founded on an intelligence as shimmering as it is convincing.”

–Alice Fulton

"Rebecca Reynolds' stunning first collection constantly surprises and delights us with its taut meditations. Never glib, Reynolds is by turns lucid, lyrical, reflectively ironic, wittily bittersweet—"a frequency/fixed in the complex" ("The Naive Bones"). Daughter of the Hangnail presents us with a brilliant, new voice that cannot be missed!"

–Cynthia Hogue

Foreword by Mary Ruefle
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Any encounter with a talented new poet is a thrill, and a visceral one, because he or she is so freshly drunk on language, so utterly lost in looking. If that is so, Rebecca Reynolds is soused. At the same time, the old-new thrills give way (and make way) for something else, a sober and ripening intelligence that each generation recasts in its own image. Rilke's famous words – call them a definition – he was a poet and hated the approximate (also translated he was a poet; he loathed the inexact) have fallen on hard times. What does it mean to be exact when the world is full of aberration? When the very notion of exactness is constantly challenged by shifting perspective? "Each word, glued with the unending multiplication of the aberrant – " Reynolds says in one poem, and the inquisitive, the parenthetical, the word or, all serve this poet in deciphering flux and sniffing deception, not with indifference-- never that--but with wonder, the tactile wonder that never leaves her and leaves her poems so richly textured and deeply felt. These poems develop, as all things do, by dividing and reassembling in new ways. The self likewise unfolds ("the earlier self/ postmarked without promise of arrival"); the poet in these poems is not finding herself (what a relief!) but making herself; if she is "lost in a world of resemblances", a world without harmony or implication, it is with a sense of the endlessness of the human capacity for questions, the endlessness of self-making that is therefore full of possibility, a hopefulness I think she alludes to when she says "the crumbs that Gretel/ scatters on the stumps are not for her/ to find her way back but for others". These poems move bravely forward and conjure the mood of a long Stevensian walk through a post-industrial town at twilight, a town that has seen better times, a town full of houses and apartments where people can be seen in lit rooms, gathered around tables and televisions, trying in very different ways, to collate their experience after a day of labor. When Reynolds—whose daring labor is language – asks "Is it possible to peel/ eternal questions from the alphabet" she has just done so, since that is, in itself, an eternal question. The book is full of – dare I say it? – eternal questions, and if we are reminded poetry is a good house in a bad neighborhood, making beauty a logistical error, we are also made aware it has stood there for a very long time and is in no danger of falling down or being torn down, so long as poets like Reynolds are given stewardship of this strange conundrum called poetry. But I have said too much; the best introduction to a new poet is the work itself.