In The Receipt, poetry blends with history and its lessons in a tribute to the human spirit. Reeves's poems are a receipt for life lived through the ages. Whether pre-cataclysmic Pompeii, Michelangelo on horseback to Bologna, or a plague doctor's first encounter with Angel Island, Reeves's fine eye, ear, and imagination find the imagery, metaphors, and language to create rhythms of history.
Reviews
Grief and love flicker at the hot center of Trish Reeves's The Receipt. In this lush, painterly book, Reeves investigates the records of things we leave behind and the "lash of memory." The speaker of these poems is at once anthropologist, curatorial researcher, and contemplative being who examines legacies of "gifts and grief." Reeves's kaleidoscopic communion with Turner, Lao-Tzu, medical photographs, and family heirlooms serves as metaphor for the fleetingness of life and the fracture of stories, which Reeves captures through acute observation and expansive vision. In a gorgeous and generous gesture, the speaker imagines a room painted Delacroix blue, "sending away the shadows." Reeves's newest collection beckons us into the glimmering light of these poems.
-Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of The New Nudity
To open the pages of Reeves's The Receipt is to open the ancient mouth of the carnyx and loose the splendid roar of poetry above the crowds. These are poems of love, place, and history-musical, painterly, and photographic. But unlike the roar of the carnyx, meant to incite the masses to war, Reeves's poems incite us to live emphatically.
-James Thomas Stevens, author of The Golden Book and A Bridge Dead in the Water
