Dion O'Reilly

With vivid and gritty imagery and blunt awareness, Dion O’Reilly’s poems push past the standard clichéd “mess in the papers, the endless /scroll of rapists and dead turtles,” the constant doom feed churning out like after mindless like. Instead, the speakers in these poems are ”Always looking for something. /Answer keys. Antidepressants” not ideas, per say, but a whole sensorious feeling body working its way “Deep through the heart/ with a muscled neck” to “the open throat of desire/the tapped vein” pumping line after line singing  “hallelujah to this great/emptiness” peeling the skin back ”into an ecstatic revelation only “the lyric moment can unfold, which is a place to be new again, in love with the world.”