Other Poetry BOOKS

FORGET IT

From Small Distribution Press: “Anastacia Reneé's FORGET IT draws the reader into the churning seas of dissolution — marriage, family, identity, livelihood — in language unknotted from the constraints of punctuation, syntax, sense— "eaten into seedless cherries"—and plunged into the fabular scape/scope of dreams, myth, fairytales, faith, race. Phantom births, ghosts, half-grown children, sex, betrayal, violence, anger, female body, the bloody aftermaths of dissolution sprawling, placental and umbilical, in the urgent, haunted language of dreaming and memory. City and speaker dissolve into one another, boundaries vanquished. What remains after dissolution? Talking to herself. From whence do (k)new form(s) arise? A "revelatory hymn", matrix upon which self and sense are (re-)configured as her own, Anastacia Reneé's FORGET IT dances on the grave of the lost—fiery tempest, a phoenix of language and presence. When we wake up, nothing is forgotten.”

“Anastacia Renée’s somber, shrewd and sensually detailed romp through a field of landmines definitively shatters both the predictability of genre and the limits of lyric. These fierce vignettes, crafted to confront, are too restless and urgent to behave while considering their impact. Instead, they meld into a story we can’t turn away from, one that—if you need to slap it with a name—could be called poetry. But Forget It (which is all but impossible to forget) isn’t simply poetry. What it is is simply inevitable.” — Patricia Smith

“This book feels like an entirely new invention. I don’t even want to call it a book. I want to call it a thick-paint impressionist new word-reality, a documentation of whatever blush invented the first word. “…you picture yourself as a child seeing the color green for the first time.” Anastacia Renée does just that, reinvents her reader as this child. This book is, to me, the color green for the first time. About this book, I feel something like what I imagine onlookers must have felt when they first witnessed the Wright brothers thrust air under wing to leave the ground.” — Tara Hardy

“In Forget it, Anastacia Renee’s new poetry collection, movement is subterranean and celestial in one breath. The lives of mothers and babies, women and girls turn the womb outward to uncover the traumas of birth and loss, love and grief. Using multiple identities and voices, the social world of appearance, judgement, identity and relationship is superimposed against the demands of woman-ness—a critique, a disruption and a declaration of the self.  Renee’s interweaving is relentless, and the interwork of prose, poetry, footnotes, dialogic, and declarations, create a new symphonic awareness of how women’s lives are intrinsically bonded to the internal. Some meta-, some stream-of-consciousness, some lyric and narrative, the movements invade the senses and interrupt the intellectual to initiate an atomic space where the elements converge. This collection is heart-pounding and dynamic. Reneé words emanate at a high absorption rate that leaves the heart pounding as we release assumptions and give into the simultaneity of understanding and liberation.” —Elmaz Abinader

Review: “Anastacia-Reneé Is Doing Something Almost No Writers Do: Publishing Three Books in One Year” The Stranger

Review from Black Radish Books