"The poems in Lynette Reini-Grandell’s first collection take root in personal experience and branch outward into the universal. The speaker in these poems seeks an identity through the exploration of history (personal, familial, and ancestral), the surrounding natural world, and the emotional complexities of a relationship that blurs our gendered lenses. 'If you are ravishing, then who will come / to ravish me?' By turning an ever-questioning eye and searching mind toward the exterior, we delve deeper into the mysteries of the interior. 'Everything follows / a current, a trace. / Every tree / whorls toward its stem.' Revelatory and authentic, the poems in Approaching the Gate reveal a psyche and a world always in the process of redefinition."--Matt Rasmussen, author of Black Aperture, National Book Award Finalist
“The ghosts of fairy tales live in these pages and color their deceptively simple surfaces, as Lynette Reini-Grandell artfully blends meditation, history, and the risk inherent in love into poetic form. The fundament of these poems is the earth that nurtures and buries us, that supports farms and horses and trees and fire and wine. As in fairy tale, it is the generosity of human spirit in the face of difficulties that tentatively and momentarily and brightly distinguishes us. The pleasures that await the reader of this volume are physical, unsparing, and profound.”--Sidney Wade, author of Straits & Narrows: Poems
"What is the gate that Lynette Reini-Grandell’s poetry takes us toward? It could be heaven, or hell, or somehow both. In some poems we are going toward that which bars us from loving each other, rejoicing when that gate finally opens. In other poems we head toward a gate of suffering, learning thereby the need to bear witness to what harm is done. In these sharply-etched, intimate songs we follow a poet over 'the contours of the curving world,' and approach whatever gates await us buoyed by a sense that words like these will see us through."--Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House
“Lynette Reini-Grandell’s first collection, Approaching the Gate, is a rich blend of star dust, music, memory—and horses, lots of horses. This is a poet who loves the world and gives herself entirely to the moment: 'we work together, / we put away the dead, / we burn with forward movement' she says. Reini-Grandell manages to take us from atomic dust to quantum love with the assuredness of a rider who knows when to reign in and when to let the poem have its way. 'I want to sense the kindling in all things, / to join the whirling dancers on the stage,' she says in 'To Change the World,' and she does.”--Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota State Poet Laureate, author of After Words
“Approaching the Gates is ganged with love and its many conflicting faces and bodies—human, celestial, animal. Love is the subject of this book—love’s difficulties, and dreams and longing to be unburdened of the beauty of life dreaming its many faces, bodies, and days—all the while, in love with even love’s impossibility, without which there (as the poet illuminates) can be no miracles. I love this debut book full of miracles where ‘even the vegetables sing.’”--Ed Bok Lee, author of Whorled
“In Lynette Reini-Grandell's new collection of poems she writes in the title poem: 'Pull apart anything that covers/scrape away whatever doesn't fit.' The truth is, everything in this beautiful collection fits. We would feel the loss if any single poem suddenly vanished. In this book there's room for love, discord, sorrow, history, loneliness, transformation, the sensuous, horses exactly as themselves, and as guides of the spirit, nature, and all its creatures, surprising leaps of image and intention--a bounty. The poet asks, 'Will there ever be/another world/like this one?' No, not really. This is Lynette Reini-Grandell's world, and we are fortunate to live it inside these poems of hers. In the first poem of this collection, the poet writes, 'I can drive, let me do this much./Let me watch the road.' Yes. Let her drive, and watch the world for us.”--Deborah Keenan, author of From Tiger to Prayer, and she so had the world
"The poems in Lynette Reini-Grandell’s first collection take root in personal experience and branch outward into the universal. The speaker in these poems seeks an identity through the exploration of history (personal, familial, and ancestral), the surrounding natural world, and the emotional complexities of a relationship that blurs our gendered lenses. 'If you are ravishing, then who will come / to ravish me?' By turning an ever-questioning eye and searching mind toward the exterior, we delve deeper into the mysteries of the interior. 'Everything follows / a current, a trace. / Every tree / whorls toward its stem.' Revelatory and authentic, the poems in Approaching the Gate reveal a psyche and a world always in the process of redefinition."--Matt Rasmussen, author of Black Aperture, National Book Award Finalist
The ghosts of fairy tales live in these pages and color their deceptively simple surfaces, as Lynette Reini-Grandell artfully blends meditation, history, and the risk inherent in love into poetic form. The fundament of these poems is the earth that nurtures and buries us, that supports farms and horses and trees and fire and wine. As in fairy tale, it is the generosity of human spirit in the face of difficulties that tentatively and momentarily and brightly distinguishes us. The pleasures that await the reader of this volume are physical, unsparing, and profound.”--Sidney Wade, author of Straits & Narrows: Poems
"What is the gate that Lynette Reini-Grandell’s poetry takes us toward? It could be heaven, or hell, or somehow both. In some poems we are going toward that which bars us from loving each other, rejoicing when that gate finally opens. In other poems we head toward a gate of suffering, learning thereby the need to bear witness to what harm is done. In these sharply-etched, intimate songs we follow a poet over 'the contours of the curving world,' and approach whatever gates await us buoyed by a sense that words like these will see us through."--Fred Marchant, author of The Looking House
Lynette Reini-Grandell’s first collection, Approaching the Gate, is a rich blend of star dust, music, memoryand horses, lots of horses. This is a poet who loves the world and gives herself entirely to the moment: 'we work together, / we put away the dead, / we burn with forward movement' she says. Reini-Grandell manages to take us from atomic dust to quantum love with the assuredness of a rider who knows when to reign in and when to let the poem have its way. 'I want to sense the kindling in all things, / to join the whirling dancers on the stage,' she says in 'To Change the World,' and she does.”--Joyce Sutphen, Minnesota State Poet Laureate, author of After Words
Approaching the Gates is ganged with love and its many conflicting faces and bodieshuman, celestial, animal. Love is the subject of this booklove’s difficulties, and dreams and longing to be unburdened of the beauty of life dreaming its many faces, bodies, and daysall the while, in love with even love’s impossibility, without which there (as the poet illuminates) can be no miracles. I love this debut book full of miracles where even the vegetables sing.’”--Ed Bok Lee, author of Whorled
In Lynette Reini-Grandell's new collection of poems she writes in the title poem: 'Pull apart anything that covers/scrape away whatever doesn't fit.' The truth is, everything in this beautiful collection fits. We would feel the loss if any single poem suddenly vanished. In this book there's room for love, discord, sorrow, history, loneliness, transformation, the sensuous, horses exactly as themselves, and as guides of the spirit, nature, and all its creatures, surprising leaps of image and intention--a bounty. The poet asks, 'Will there ever be/another world/like this one?' No, not really. This is Lynette Reini-Grandell's world, and we are fortunate to live it inside these poems of hers. In the first poem of this collection, the poet writes, 'I can drive, let me do this much./Let me watch the road.' Yes. Let her drive, and watch the world for us.”--Deborah Keenan, author of From Tiger to Prayer, and she so had the world