Bullies in Love by Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter and Little Red Tree Publishing are pleased to offer Bullies in Love, Reiter's fourth poetry book and second full-length collection, with illustrations by fine art photographer and Massachusetts Cultural Council award winner Toni Pepe. Bullies in Love is on sale at Little Red Tree and Amazon.
Little Red Tree publishes books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and art that "delight, entertain, and educate".
Jendi Reiter is the author of Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010), Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009), and A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003). Their awards include a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists' Grant for Poetry, the 2013 Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize, the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, the 2011 James Knudsen Editor's Prize in Fiction from Bayou Magazine, the 2011 OSA Enizagam Award for Fiction, the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and second prize in the 2010 Iowa Review Awards for Fiction. They are the editor of WinningWriters.com, an online resource site for creative writers. Visit their blog at jendireiter.com and follow them on Twitter at @JendiReiter.
Toni Pepe teaches at Boston University. She has shown her work at New England Photography Biennial, Art Basel, Photo L.A., the Center for Photography in Woodstock, NY, the University of Notre Dame, and numerous other venues in the US and internationally. Her photographs and installation work address the construction of identity and the performativity of narrative, gender, and memory. Visit her website at tonipepe.com.
Praise for Bullies in Love
"This book is an immensely enjoyable, sometimes beautiful, and often moving romp—tamed and targeted rage—through the hazardous territory of inter-personal and political relationships. Reiter's way with contemporary American English is acutely sensitive, and I cannot think of a better way to address the apparent oxymoron of the collection's title. It is a full, rich book—you will get your money's worth. It is also often laugh out loud funny—an impressive rarity in poetry that is also serious."
—E. Taylor, 5-star Amazon review
"An outstanding, impressive collection from a multiple award winner...The writing dazzles, surprises, and beguiles the reader with its unexpected vistas."
—Carol Smallwood, author, Divining the Prime Meridian (Wordtech Editions, 2015)
"How can one voice be so raw and so refined? How can a poet so fiercely female speak more universally than those who deny our differences? The electrifying paradoxes of art and life snap from every page here as Reiter names the driving forces of her life—our lives."
—Nancy White, administrator of The Word Works Washington Prize, author of Detour (Tamarack Editions, 2010)
"Bitter, tender, contained, full of pain and hilarity, this fiercely intelligent collection begins with one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read. 'Inconsolable joy,' Reiter writes to her newborn son. 'Motherless, I mother.' Within this grace all questions resolve: 'Each glinting wavelet a day of my history,/washing my hands as I lose it.' The history to be known and released includes childhood abuse, and cruelties both familial and social...In these poems, theology becomes concrete and passionate."
—Ruth Thompson, author of Woman with Crows (Saddle Road Press, 2013), A Room of Her Own Foundation "To the Lighthouse" Prize Finalist
"Jendi Reiter's astute observations of the complex nature of love reveal not only its beauty but also its damning consequences. From the child to the adult, the home to the wider world, this collection of affirming yet disturbing tight-knit poetry in various forms kaleidoscopes vivid images, framing the struggle to free oneself from parental and societal expectations from start to finish. These poems span the coming-of-age search for self-respect and love; the ideologies of marketing and religion; teachers' censorship of children's literature; and political crimes against sexual minorities."
—Suzanne Covich, child rights activist and educator, author of When We Remember They Call Us Liars (Fremantle Press, 2012)
"Lyric, narrative, prose poem...in all her work Jendi Reiter is constantly innovating, injecting her lines with fresh, sharp language and taut, piercing images which yes, surprise, exhilarate, and delight, but also force the reader to rethink their relationships to social forces. The nature of love and desire are here, but so are family, faith, the body, the natural world, pop culture...even a few stray cats. Jendi explores these as both priestess and stand-up comedian, deploying reverence and humor (sometimes at the same time), and gazing upon whimsy and atrocity with equal scrutiny."
—Charlie Bondhus, author of All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), 2014 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
"Beyond her impressive verbal pyrotechnics, there's an invigorating way of making unexpected connections, as in this from one of my favorite poems, 'What Dora Said to Agnes': 'When a man undresses a woman/he is unfolding a letter/he expected would be addressed to him…' and in the same poem: 'When a woman undresses a man/she is promising to wash him,/she is offering the hand that will close his eyes.' Reiter's uncommon insights into love, partnering, sorrow, death and new ways of living, together and apart, will inspire and comfort the fellow traveler, the reader, you."
—Robert McDowell, author of Poetry as Spiritual Practice and The World Next to This One; robertmcdowell.net
"In her remarkable collection of poems, Bullies in Love, Jendi Reiter has created a complex odditorium of characters with unique and often disturbing voices: poems peopled with bullies, the disenfranchised, monsters, prostitutes, criminals, the abused and forgotten, all searching for meaning, for faith and love in a postmodern, often cynical world."
—Pamela Uschuk, author of Crazy Love, 2010 American Book Award Winner, and Blood Flower (Wings Press)
Please enjoy this poem from Bullies in Love.
What Does It Mean When You Dream of the Ocean?
Cthulhu's got issues with his mother.
Ten thousand years old and he still wets the couch.
He could always eat the doctor,
snap like a skinny lobster leg
in his octopus beak, but frankly,
he's too bored to find another.
How he misses the cold black deep, the misshapen towers,
the endless waiting, half-asleep
among slow and nameless things.
Now words clog his gullet like broken clamshells
and every sightline has an edge.
He picks up a crayon,
a rake from the sand tray,
and drawing a trail
of slime on the Chinese carpet,
describes the Black Goat of the Woods.
Very interesting.
It must stand for something else.
R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn,
Cthulhu explains. The doctor writes
DSM-5 297.1, 301.7.
He waits for the spell of her symbols
to send a blinding color through the window,
the anti-white, prism of unseeable shades.
His suckers stick to the leatherette.
Eons ago some creature must have pushed him
out of her cave into a greater one,
but what matters memory?
These human bugs, these prawns,
trace their inch-long lives in sand,
look down to the scribble for reasons,
blind to the stars.
Risperidone 2 mg/d.
Cthulhu wakes
at 4 AM from the dream of a woman
in a black bustle, a pin at her neck,
telling her child he's too ugly to go outside
their wooden house whose steps tumble down to the docks.
Copper and salt singe the air.
The sheets are wet and he is hungry.
