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In The Storm That Tames Us, her second full-length poetry collection, Renée Gregorio fashions the contradiction and change between singleness and relationship into a rich, lyrical poetry which echoes the impassioned tradition of Mirabai, Yosano Akiko, and Anne Sexton. Gregorio demonstrates a comfort with a wide range of poetic possibility — working with traditional forms such as haiku, tanka, ghazal and villanelle, as well as with the prose poem and experimentations with the lyric poem. Her subject matter is equally diverse, encompassing the actual and philosophical “other”, social doubt, love, the natural world, death, her practice of the Japanese martial art Aikido, and a sense of place having deep significance, whether that place be the Southwest, London, Barelas, a mountain village, or simply the sense one can achieve of one’s own center, no matter what the external place.
— Jimmy Santiago Baca
Gregorio's women give voice to our twin longings for individual identity and relationship. Gregorio articulates the tangle of our desires in bold and nuanced language. — Robin Becker
It has a quiet yet passionate intensity, richly connected to earth and to the yearning and scarey rhythms and rites of true loving. The intimacy is both gentle and unafraid . — John Nichols
Renée Gregorio's work has appeared in many journals in the United States, including Iris, Exquisite Corpse, Fish Drum, Blue Mesa Review, Heaven Bone, Frank, Nexus, Calyx and American Tanka, and in England in The Rialto and Writing Women. Originally from Massachusetts, Renée has lived in New Mexico since 1985 where she's made her living in various ways-poet, bookstore manager, writing teacher, freelance book editor, and as proofreader, editor, and drafter for the state legislature. She earned her masters' degree from Antioch University in London. She was one of the founding editors of The Taos Review and one of the featured writers in the video, Honoring the Muse. Her work has appeared in several anthologies of poetry, including The New Mexico Poetry Renaissance; Written With A Spoon; and The Practice of Peace and will appear in the Calyx anthology, A Fierce Brightness and the University of New Mexico Press's Anthology of New Mexico Poets. Several chapbooks of her poems have been published, most recently the online chapbook, Hungry Till I Learned the Word for Corn. Her other full-length collection, The Skins of Possible Lives was published by Blinking Yellow Books in 1996 . She lives in El Rito, New Mexico in a very charming house with her husband, John Brandi. |
