BOOK LAUNCH: Condition

Friday, Apr 3

7:00pm

ETGMT

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57/75 spots left

Join me for a poetry reading to celebrate the launch of my third book, CONDITION, winner of the 2024 Hillary Gravendyk Prize from the Inlandia Institute. A collection of poems, poetry comics, illustrations, and hybrid texts, Condition is a vivid account of early motherhood during the isolation and global intensity of the COVID pandemic. I can't wait to celebrate it with you. The evening will include a reading, sharing of text and images, booksales, and a Q & A led by esteemed Vermont poet, Eve Alexandra. Advanced praise for Condition: We are born with “so little language,” Meg Reynolds writes in her most recent work, Condition. Yet in these poems, there is so much of it, visual and textual, articulating maternal devotion and everything that motherhood entails: worry, fear, joy. Even the drawings and sketches throughout the book show Reynolds deep in poetic thought, words not always necessary to unpack emotion, every line and trace just another way to love: a baby’s portrait, a baby’s hand, the poet’s “birth-softened body.” Rigorous poetic technique, equilibrium and confidence in each textual and visual composition draw us nearer to the answer to the question: how close can we ever get to what we make, be it art, or a child? You’ll find no certainties here, but you’ll leave with more insight into what it means to be a poet reckoning with having chosen the life she has and not that other life, the one we imagine we could have lived. Octavio Quintanilla— The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press) & Las Horas Imposibles / The Impossible Hours (University of Arizona Press). Meg Reynolds’ Condition is a Beautiful and unflinching vision of mothering, morphing, and being, couched in the bodily lyricism of life. Reynolds’s precision of language and depth of observation makes Condition an astounding story of motherhood in which the mythic and the momentary continually collide. Mark Leidner– Returning the Sword the Stone (Fonograph Editions) & Under the Sea (Tyrant Books) Meg Reynolds is one of our boldest chroniclers of contemporary motherhood, her poems rooted in the precise language of the body, witchy and subversive, deeply sensual. In Condition, she illuminates a postpartum world during quarantine, revealing a speaker “ravenous and bewildered,” her exhaustion mixed with “animal joy.” Here, domesticity is always laced with the feral, woven with folklore and oracles, the beauty and terror of the ancient woods. Reynolds, a multi-genre artist, intersperses her own black-and-white drawings in the text to create an utterly original offering, a tapestry of mothers and daughters. Condition is incandescent, lit with primal love and rage, braided with imagination and grit. Diana Whitney— Dark Beds (June Road Press) & Girl Trouble (CavanKerry Press) Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher from New England. An instructor in writing and humanities at Vermont Adult Learning in Burlington, her work has been published in a number of literary journals including Mid-American Review, RHINO, The Offing, Iterant, Prairie Schooner, New England Review and the Kenyon Review. A graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program, her poetry and comic work has been three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize and once for Best the Net. Her first collection of poetry comics, A Comic Year, was published in October 2021 from Finishing Line Press. Her second collection, Does the Earth, was published in May 2023 from Harpoon Books. Reynolds' poetry was published in Best New Poets 2023. Reynolds' was also the 2024 winner of Inlandia Institute's Hilary Gravendyk Prize with her collection, Condition, forthcoming April 2026. You can read more of her work via her biweekly publications on her Substack, Condition and Other Conditions. Eve Alexandra’s None of Us in White won the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize, and her first book The Drowned Girl was selected by C.K. Williams for The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Alexandra’s poems have appeared in Narrative, Barrow Street, Cape Cod Review, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. She teaches creative writing and literature at the University of Vermont.

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