Donna Vorreyer (Poetry) | Willowbrook, IL

Donna Vorreyer is the author of Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (Sundress Publications, 2016) and A House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013), as well as seven chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks. She has received a residency from the Kimmel-Harding-Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska and serves as the reviews editor for Stirring: A Literary Collection.

Books

Chapbooks

• Tinder, Smolder, Bones and Snow (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2016). Poetry.
• Encantado (illustrated by Matt Kish) (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015). Poetry.
• We Build Houses of Our Bodies (dancing girl press, 2014). Poetry.
• The Imagined Life of the Pioneer Wife (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2013). Poetry.
• Ordering the Hours (Maverick Duck Press, 2012). Poetry.
• Womb/Seed/Fruit (Finishing Line Press, 2010). Poetry.
• Come Out, Virginia (Naked Mannekin Press, 2010 ). Poetry. (out of print)

Press & Reviews

Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story

” …a riveting collection that reminds us that love & grief, like fire and water, are elemental forces that
summon both sorrow and song.”
—Eduardo C. Corral

“Love, that dark song married to footsteps, is pulled between ecstatic fulfillment and loss in Vorreyer’s poems.”
—Traci Brimhall

“These poems supersede elegy–they are more darkly funny and discerning than that – and become instead a personal eschatology, celebrating the world even as we examine how it ends.”
—Sandra Beasley

A House of Many Windows

The poems that comprise this enviable collection are unflinching and fearless, crafting new definitions for the definition of woman—as mother, as lover, as flawed and singular being.
—Patricia Smith

“I have a need to carry things,” says the speaker in Donna Vorreyer’s A House of Many Windows, a Millay-like sequence on longing—not for a lover, but for a child she can’t have. Fiercely, she enlists poetry to conceive her tie to the unborn—“My uncoupled sonnet, my comma / splice. Forgive the mediocre world, / ill-versed in our intimate literacy”—and to the boy she will eventually adopt and raise. Such mysterious and steadfast love makes Vorreyer’s poems part of a wider narrative, having to do with human connection at its core—as something way, way thicker than blood.
—Diana Goetsch

Love what we do? Take a second to support us on Patreon!