Renée Gregorio, Abyss & Bridge (poetry)

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Abyss & Bridge

Purchase signed copies of Abyss & Bridge from Collected Works by calling the store (505) 988-4226 to place your order.

The poems in Renée Gregorio’s Abyss & Bridge tell of the ways that travel can serve to enlarge what is possible between human beings from differing cultures. The book centers on both travel and return, what is required to open oneself to a new world and unpredictable situations, and how one’s sense of camaraderie with others is deepened through dialogue. The main thematic thread is, as one of the poems states: “searching for that common language / that connects to the wide sea / as much as the sea within.”

In this radiant collection, difference provides a necessary bridge that returns us to ourselves and to each other and shows us how to move out, and move back in, with a new sense of belonging, both to the world at large and to a sense of place.

Renée’s poetry is informed by the expansive landscape of northern New Mexico as well as by journeys to Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, India, Bali, the Himalayas, Italy, and Greece. In her work it is evident that she loves foreignness as well as form. Her long-time practice of the Japanese martial art aikido taught her what it means to occupy form through the body. Her poems emerge from the blood and heart of the everyday as much as from her travels.

About the Poet

Renée’s poetry is informed equally by the stillness, expansiveness and landscape of northern New Mexico as it is by her wide-ranging travels to places such as Cuba, Bali, Italy, England, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam and India. Her published collections include The Skins of Possible Lives, The Storm That Tames Us, Drenched, Water Shed and Snow Falling on Snow. Collaborative publications include: Love & Death: Greatest Hits (with Joan Logghe & Miriam Sagan, which won the New Mexico Book Award) and Pa’ Siempre: Cuba Poems, Unmasking the Fire and Road to the Cloud’s House (with John Brandi). The Palace Press at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe has featured several of her poems in broadsides and unique limited edition letterpress books (most recently, “Fernando” and “Advice to a Traveler to Cuba”).

She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from Antioch University, and the rank of sandan in the martial art, aikido. She is a co-founder of the publishing collective, Tres Chicas Books and founded and edited The Taos Review, one of New Mexico’s foremost literary journals.