Eleanor Rees does with language what an origami master does with paper or a contortionist their own limbs: she teases and manipulates it into wondrous, strange, and alluring shapes. It's been several years since I've read work this stimulating, the engagement with which offering such profound peace and pleasure and such resonant rewards.–Niall Griffiths
These poems are an exquisite unearthing of meaning in nature. They trace metamorphosis, find mind in everything, and suggest not so much what things look like to humans but what they feel like to themselves.–Jay Griffiths, author of
Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape These are shape-shifting poems from a shape-shifting poet, who listens to what the place has to say and always keeps her feet on the ground.–Paul Kingsnorth
On Eleanor Rees's previous work:
An ambitious, experimental voice vibrantly charged with the energy of city life.–Carol Ann Duffy, British Poet Laureate
On Eleanor Rees's previous work:
Eleanor Rees's debut collection offers up a heartfelt hymn to her native Liverpool. Her dense, textured renderings of its landscapes are eloquent, but it is her importunate, ambiguous relationship with the city that provides these poems with their drive. She is at once possessor and possessed: bestriding the rooftops like a descendent of Whitman one moment, breaking the top from the cathedral ... oozing steam/ cream; diminished and vulnerable, tarmac ... biting at my ankles, the next. [...] Such imaginative freewheeling carries the risk of disorienting the reader, but the coherence provided by the location gives the poems vital integrity.–
The GuardianOn Eleanor Rees's previous work: Here is a poetry that relishes the chaotic and magical; trees and plants abandon gardens and start to move down the street, humans give birth to animals, houses come alive. Eleanor Rees's language is sensuous, unpredictable. The materials of folktale and border ballad are never far away.–
The Guardian On Eleanor Rees's previous work:
Eleanor Rees's poetry is strikingly pleasing, its distinctive rhythms as insidious as water.–IPN Review
On Eleanor Rees's previous work: I love the meaty, muscularity of the poems ... I caught the boat to Ireland from Liverpool recently and found myself remembering big chunks of the river poem as we chugged past the harbour bar.–Frank Cottrell Boyce
If all poetry is an autobiography of the author's inner life, then Small Hands gives us a striking glimpse into how beautiful and troubling it is to be Mona Arshi [...] Redolent with the peculiar intimacies of family, and brimming with carefully-controlled and surprising imagery, Arshi gives us a book to return to–not to revise our intellectual understanding, but to slip into her skin.
Huffington PostTogether, Blood Child and Riverine convey seductively cross-fading time-scapes; it is in the end this quality that makes these remarkable poems linger in the memory, unsettling and disquieting, redefining so-called realisties. Dark, visceral, her use of language and image is controlled and concentrated, and through it the message is one of connection.
Sean Street, Tears in the Fence
