Mairéad Byrne’s poems are moving microcosms in which a keen power of observation and playful imagination fuse with the minutiae of daily life to create small missives of quirky and insightful documentation. Her source material includes everything from the weather to credit card bills to news reports to human body parts to animal pelts and all of these seemingly disparate details amass into a kind of living, breathing envelope that holds the marrow of existence itself in all its harsh reality, weird surreality, absurdity, fragility, and occasional beauty. Often funny and sometimes sobering, Byrne’s work exposes the difficult-to-reconcile distractions, detritus, and rubble that surround us from all sides, but also culls glowing artifacts from such debris.
-Juliet Cook
A modest ma(s)terwork of colors & delights, of plays of language (lost & found), the push & pull of parody, of politics & domesticities, of day to day conundrums, of observations & inventions, of the connection (as she has it) of “small things to other small things,” of the oft-derided fancy as the brighter sister of imagination. These are some thoughts that flash by while reading Mairéad Byrne’s agile, humoristic, & deceptively profound new book. The best of, surely, & with a promise of still more to come.
-Jerome Rothenberg
