Lynette Reini-Grandell has published her work in Ache, Evergreen Chronicles, Poetry Motel, and on MNArtists.org. Her poem "Radio Girls" appears in the anthology It's Animal but Merciful and was nominated for a 2012 Pushcart Prize. She is the recipient of a 2011 Minnesota State Arts Board grant for poetry, a 2010 What Light Poetry award winner, received a 2009 Intermedia Arts Writer-to-Writer Mentorship, won the 2003 SASE/Ache prize for fiction, and edited Rifle Sport Alternative Art Gallery's only literary journal, Magazine.
Her poetry is on the walls of the Carlton Arms Hotel in Manhattan, in an installation created with her husband Venus, a transgender artist and musician. A feature-length documentary about their relationship, "Venus of Mars," by Emily Goldberg, has toured film festivals around the world. More information about the documentary can be found at venusofmars.com.
She has performed poetry and fiction at countless spoken word venues, among them Intermedia Arts, Patrick's Cabaret, Kieran's, the Turf Club, the Poetry Café (London), Cacophony Chorus, the Love Ugly, Ricochet Kitchen, Soul Invictus (Phoenix), El-Chango (Bisbee), and the Minnesota State Fair. She appears regularly with the Bosso Poetry Company and is on J. Otis Powell's CD, Theology: Love and Revolution. When not reading, she accompanies other writers and burlesque performers on jazz violin.
She co-hosts "Write on Radio," on KFAI (kfai.org), a radio show interviewing local and national writers about their work.
Lynette Reini-Grandell holds a B.A. from Carleton College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota. Her dissertation is titled "The Modern Sound: American Poetry and the Rise of the Recording Industry, 1920-1940."
She is an English professor at Normandale Community College, sings in a church choir, and has been variously vice president, president, past president of the Minnesota Council of Teachers of English.
"Approaching the Gate" is her first poetry publication.
"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
 |
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
