Memoirs of the Unfaithful Lover
“The title poem provides the emotional center of this volume in which Bessy Reyna reaches an intense emotional level in each love poem.” —Roberto Fernandez Eglesias
The Battlefield of Your Body
“Bessy Reyna is an honest poet. She writes unflinchingly of loss: a lost island, a lost lover, a lost moment. She faces the police beating of a friend or a father’s drunken stupor with the same bravery. Yet she can also sense the fleeting poetry in a circle of fallen leaves, in the intimacy of bodies. Bessy Reyna is a clear-eyed guide to the world we see but don’t see.” —Martin Espada
“Bessy Reyna knows the importance of language ‘The last time we used / silence as bullets / we were mortally wounded / in the conflict,’ she says in the title poem of this new collection. Bilingual and bicultural, Reyna uses poetry both to confront and to stretch the boundaries of our ordinary thinking. Her poems cross borders of time as well as place, taking us to a territory where past and present, the personal and the political, even love and hate inform each other – a territory where, crossing ‘the frontiers of desire,’ even ‘life and death dissolve’.”
—Martha Collins
She Remembers
“With their passion, humanity and melancholy laced with zany it, Bessy Reyna’s poems just about leap off the page. For the full experience, however, you should hear her read them.” —Rennie McQuilken
“Reyna is an acute observer and feeler of the subtleties of experience and has all the words to re-create these for readers who might never have lived anywhere close to her world.”
—Laurel Speer