Description
In Turbulence, poet and non-fiction author Tony Reevy looks at “family” in the United States through the lens of one family and its members’ collective experiences over the last fifty years. The poems in the book explore major paradoxes about the U.S.—a love of nature combined with environmental destruction; a democracy that for years denied the rights of millions; a wealthy country that offers little or no assistance for many of its people—and how they affect one extended family. Most importantly, Turbulence asks how families cope with such unexpected events as the death of a child, or a young mother or father—tragedies that our society largely chooses to ignore.
Praise for Turbulence
These poems are the photos not taken, “…lost before they even exist.” Reevy saves snapshots of memories as memory, itself, becomes lost to loved ones by dementia or death. “Simple blossoms taking me back” with “white bells ringing,” nature frames his search, “Where did you come from?” Via various modes of transportation from walking a trail laced with a copperhead to flying on a plane, turbulence pushes him past sites of personal and historical significance, always to arrive where things are better. Suspenseful throughout, from childhood to fatherhood, “You never know where a boy is going to take you” in this collection that substantiates the necessity of poetry.
—Hilda Downer, When Light Waits For Us
These tender, elegiac poems crack open that thin membrane between the worlds of the past and present, the living and the dead, youth and age. Tony Reevy captures with preternatural clarity the moments when we draw strength from broken and mended objects, people, and relationships. Or simply move on from them. While often marking sorrows, these brief lyrics nonetheless celebrate both the remarkable and the quotidian in humble and strangely wondrous ways. Many of them will haunt me for quite some time.
—Robin Hemley, Oblivion, an After Autobiography
I have been reading the poems of my friend, Tony Reevy for some time now, and they never fail to move my mind and heart. A deft lyrical poet, Tony is also a painter-on-the-page. More of a sketch artist, perhaps, with the enviable gift of getting to the emotional nub of experience with expert clarity, conveying its fleeting meaning with flawless, haiku-like concision. When you read poems like “Somewhere on I-79” or “Buying a Plot,” you recognize that he has taken you to a place in your own life and you say, “Yes! That’s how it is or was. I felt that too, about my parent or child or town. I feel it now.” I hope Tony won’t mind my adapting his powerful statement of a father’s love for a son and applying it to the Tony himself: “You never know what a poet’s going to do, where a poet’s going to take you.” Indeed, but it’s always deeper than you thought possible.
—Maria Rouphail, Apertures and Second Skin
Tony Reevy is a connoisseur of trains. I hear shuddering throughout Turbulence. I hear Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waiting for a Train” shaking tracks, the ritual of waking up a reality to cherish, as Turbulence becomes an elegy for promises. The world’s railroad tracks Reevy’s lines. Nostalgia blows whistles—Get on down the road the best way you can. Grave-markers wait—stones without names or epitaphs for the slaves.
—Shelby Stephenson, poet laureate of North Carolina, 2015-18 and former editor of Pembroke Magazine.
