The Girl Who Married the Reindeer

$10.95 – $18.95

In The Girl Who Married the Reindeer, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin radically redesigns the language and form of poetic narrative. In poems about journeys to worlds real and metaphorical, she reveals deft crossings of borders, linguistic boundaries, and cultures, from the sepulcher of Lazarus to the web of a spider “who makes her own new center every day.” Beginning mid-journey, the poems often arrive at mysterious destinations, as when a scholar

. . . reaches the language that has no word for his,
No word for hers, and is brought up sudden
Like a boy in a story faced with a small locked door.
Who is that he can hear panting on the other side?
The steam of her breath is turning the locked lock green.

Throughout the volume, Ní Chuilleanáin displaces the finger posts of narrative which is redefined of a traveler’s productive strayings and even self-exiles: “I follow the road that follows the lie of the land.”

Praise for The Girl who Married the Reindeer

“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s new collection of poems, The Girl who Married the Reindeer, brings together poems so elegant and difficult, rich and haunting, that this slim volume stands as both her finest achievement to date and a landmark in contemporary poetry.”
– Helen Emmitt, Irish Literary Supplement

“Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s best work (of which this collection is unquestionably part) spins . . . elements in a liminal landscape between this world and another, far more marvelous one.”
– Jenny Ludwig, Boston Review