Wild Things: A Trans-Glam-Punk-Rock Love Story (Minnesota Historical Society Press) launched in March!
Set against the backdrop of the art, literary, and indie rock worlds of Minneapolis and New York in the 1990s and early 2000s, the book explores Reini-Grandell’s long relationship with Venus de Mars through their romance, Venus’s developing awareness of her gender, and the struggle to be themselves. The book is a deeply personal story of love and growth, providing insights into a time when the knowledge and terminology we have today around transgender identities did not exist.
Lynette will be reading at Magers and Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 1st. More info is in the events calendar and here. The next day (June 2nd) Lynette will be at Drury Lane Books in Grand Marais. More info is in the event calendar and here.
Information about future readings can be found on the Events page.
Wild Verge got a great review from Kirkus Reviews ("A singeing collection of surprises and epiphanies")!
It's been selected by their Indie Editors to be one of 35 reviews in the Indie section, an honor given to fewer than 10% of their Indie reviews!
Orders on IndieBound available here.
Orders on Amazon available here.
Wild Verge is published by Holy Cow! Press.
The poems in Reini-Grandell's second collection time travel her world, taking us on wild, unpredictable journeys to her childhood, into the minds of bears, horses and reindeer, seeing her marriage from her partner's viewpoint, with visitations to the Witch Tree, and her Finnish ancestors. All in all, a celebration of the writer's daunting ability to recreate the universe on her own terms.
Praise for Wild Verge:
"This graceful collection of meditations on love, grain and stone, fur and breath, emptiness and cures, and the earthy underground offers many entries. Something holy happens in these passages. There's a vintage light here; float, swim, feel the gravity, and let yourself be pulled into its beautiful paths."--Sun Yung Shin, author of Unbearable Splendor
"This is a book of sheer resurrection where the poems demand a union between their creator and her new presence in the world. The voice here announces that poetry is a physical activity that will break all barriers toward a complete transformation of the self. Nothing is held back in these powerful poems that emerge from the life giving forces of the imagination."--Ray Gonzalez, author of Beautiful Wall
"The title poem is an announcement―Wild Verge is the truth of the book―this poet honors wildness, sees boldly, risks, and considers the universe and all that’s in it her subject. In 'Primitive Tools' she writes: 'I am tracking what is missing…' and we believe her. In this collection we come into relationship with how this poet sees personal heritage and history, we are given intensely focused visions of childhood, we watch her wrestle with bold, loving choices in her adult years, read her compelling poems that cut to the heart of political and moral matters in ways unexpected and moving, and we are convinced by the words in her poem, "Old Man Bear Song": 'I say these things that you might see them, /I love these things that you might love them.' I’m so glad there’s this new collection by Lynette Reini-Grandell. She does the poet’s job: sees the world in her own intense, vivid ways, makes her language fresh and surprising, and we do not want to stop reading. Take your own wild verge and get this book."--Deborah Keenan, author of ten collections of poetry and a book of writing ideas, from tiger to prayer
"This woman’s poems sing with wonder and delight. I do not know what to call her. Shaman? Singer? Survivor? Lover? Priest? Lover of language and rhythm and art and music and horses and a transgender partner for sure. A benediction for sure.”--Jim Lenfestey, author of A Marriage Book: 50 Year of Poems from a Marriage
Approaching the Gate: Poems was released in October 2014 from Holy Cow! Press and won the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Bookstore and library orders from Consortium are available here. Orders from Amazon are available here.
Praise for Approaching the Gate:
"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
Selected short publications:
2021 “In the Giant’s Castle,” Sunday Morning Lyricality, March 28, 2021. https://lyricality.org/2021/03/28/in-the-giants-castle-by-lynette-reini-grandell/
2018 "The Trees Speak So Plainly at Pike Island, an Internment Camp Winter 1862-1863 for Dakota Women, Children, and Elders" at Parks and Points.
2017 "If Somewhere," Alligator Juniper, volume 21, spring 2017.
2016 "Stones for Crossing a River or Stream" and "For Your Information," Green Hills Literary Lantern, volume 27, 2016. http://ghll.truman.edu/ghll27/Reini-Grandell%20Two%20Poems.html.
2015 "It Is Called a Tracery," Seminary Ridge Review, autumn 2015. https://www.ltsg.edu/images/upload/SRR_Autumn_2015.pdf. Page 127.
2015 "Primitive Tools," great weather for MEDIA anthology: Before Passing, fall 2015.
2014 “To Change the World,” Prøof Magazine, volume 1, issue 3, summer 2014. http://issuu.com/proofmagazine/docs/proofftr/0 Page 14.
2013 “Through the Ice,” Revolver, fall 2013. Lucky page 13! http://www.around-around.com/ice/.
2013 “Approaching the Gate” and “Horses in Winter," TRIVIA: Voices of Feminism, issue 15, Fall 2013. http://www.triviavoices.com/reini-grandell-lynette.html.
2013 “The Naturalist,” The Centrifugal Eye, autumn 2013. http://issuu.com/centrifugaleye/docs/tceautumn2013-jeweled/28 Page 28.
2013 “In Memory of Tennessee Williams, Who Died in 1983 after Choking on the Plastic Cap of a Pill Bottle,” Poetry City, USA 3.
2013 “Fix My Shoes,” in the anthology The Understanding between Foxes and Light, by great weather for MEDIA.
2013 “Ohio River,” “The Dandelion-Gatherer,” and “The Thing about the Ocean,” The River Muse, March 2013 https://trmj.wordpress.com/tag/lynette-reini-grandell/.
2012 “Radio Girls,” in the anthology It's Animal but Merciful by great weather for MEDIA.
2012 “The Thoroughbred’s Black Knees,” Poetry City, USA 2.
2010 “This Horse’s Ears.” MNLit “What Light Poetry Project,” MNArtists.org (Jan. 12, 2010). http://www.mnartists.org/article.do?rid=253458.
2003 “Roadkill.” Ache Magazine. (March 2003).
1996 “Dearly Beloved.” Evergreen Chronicles 11 (Fall 1996): 58-67 (with Steven Grandell).
