Description

Evelyn Reilly lives in New York City and writes poetry, as well as text for museum exhibits on historical and cultural subjects. She received a degree in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Writing Program at Columbia University. Her literary work has appeared in ACM, American Writing, Barrow Street, Parnassus, The New Yorker, 6ix, Salamander, and 3rd Bed, among other journals. Her poetry was selected by Heather McHugh for the anthology Sad Little Breathings & Other Acts of Ventriloquism and has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Hiatus explores the fascinating, frustrating, often tragic, and sometimes comic “gap” between words and world, human being and human being, and the human species and its cosmic setting. At times writing “between the lines” of older traditions, at others opening new spaces for writing to inhabit, Reilly has created a book that is both playful and scholarly. Leslie Scalapino describes Hiatus as “a social comedy by lines delineating contrasting roles interior and exterior.” Elaine Equi applauds its “intentionally wayward and witty poems.” Rachel Blau DuPlessis calls it “a way of working through life’s multiplicities in inventive, particular and discerning language.” Hiatus was a semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and a finalist for the National Poetry Series.