Join us for a reception, reading, discussion, and book signing with poet Dion O’Reilly to celebrate her new poetry collection Sadness of the Apex Predator

Reception: 6:00-6:30
Readings and discussion with Dion O’Reilly: 6:30 -7:00
Book signing: 7:00-7:30

“Dion O’Reilly’s brilliant book, Sadness of the Apex Predator simply can’t be contained in a short comment.  There’s an entire world here, as well as the history of  beauty and unspeakable brutality of which the human  animal is equally capable. The poems are searingly vivid,  public, political, but also intensely and painfully intimate.  O’Reilly moves effortlessly between the lyric and demotic,  a whisper building to a scream and back again. And always  the wondrous, leaping nerve of O’Reilly’s language here.  Image after image completely floored me. This is one of  my favorite books in recent memory. What a voice.”
—Erin Bilieu

“The poems in Dion O’Reilly’s Sadness of the Apex Predator leap off the page with ruthless, unsparing language. In  brilliantly sharp sestinas, pantoums, and stanzaic forms,  Dion O’Reilly lays bare the pathetic nature of cruelty and  how enormous an abusive mother is to a child: ‘When my  mother threw encyclopedias at us / she threw the world.’  The poems root into questions about love, girlhood, and  sexuality with startling honesty and show that child abuse  persists long after childhood ends ‘How many times have  I returned / to a mother who savaged me? / Searched for  her again and again // in the bodies of men.’ Too often we  turn away from the brutality of the domestic realm, yet  these poems put it starkly front and center. I was entirely  absorbed by their visceral beauty. I think O’Reilly is writing  some of the most compelling poems out there.”
—Jessica Cuello

“Dion O’Reilly’s Sadness of the Apex Predator is a tour de  force with urgent poems that address the perilous present  and the past that’s gotten us here. She writes astonishing  poems of her personal history of severe abuse and world  history of severe abuse. She even contemplates poets taking  ‘a break/from our ruined selves/in favor of our ruined  country.’ A burn survivor, O’Reilly writes visceral poems  addressing not only the pain but also vulnerability—‘I  had no skin./I’m sorry. I had no skin.’ In later poems she  returns to the body—its pleasure and difficulties. These are  wonderful and necessary poems.”
—Denise Duhamel

“In Sadness of the Apex Predator, a girl-child withdraws into a scar-riddled body, a space safe from a mother’s whip, where she takes refuge in the ‘proper hush and flow machine’ of her own body until she is ready to face a world that  preys on her. With language both muscular and merciless,  O’Reilly debrides aggression from the newfound body of her speaker. She lays bare some very hard truths, yet these are poems that teach foremost of decency, cautioning us to wean ourselves of the hindbrain’s instinct to inflict harm, of the impulse to place ourselves first.”
—Rooja Mohassessy