Böcker av Valyntina Grenier

Poetry Collection by Valyntina Grenier.Valyntina is a multi-genre eco artist living with her wife in Tucson, Arizona. She works with paint, ink, Neon, encaustic medium, recycled or repurposed materials and words. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks, the tête-bêche Fever Dream/ Take Heart (Cathexis Northwest Press 2020) and In Our Now (Finishing Line Press 2022). Find more of her work at valyntinagrenier.com or find her on Insta @valyntinagrenier.In Honeymoon Shoes, Valyntina Grenier writes "There is always already a war going on / all our dead / all our little deaths." These poems rage against capitalism and brutality, while insisting on tenderness. Following the zigzagging, musical logic of sound and play, they remind us "how lucky to live / to hear a donkey bray." This is a collection and a poet I won't forget. - Susan Nguyen, author of Dear Diaspora ¿¿Valyntina Grenier's Honeymoon Shoes exhibits our doubtfulness in living, in real-time: When catastrophe strikes, we wonder, "What is old, what new?" If the ugliness that surrounds us is not new, then how do we categorize the chaos we've witnessed since 2016? Grenier responds, "The world created us-" and "we make disasters." What can we do with this wildness but admit we are a part of it? How can a white woman speak about her white privilege without centering herself in the very act? She can't. But she can say that she can't, and she can make sure her canvas doesn't stay blank. In "City's Limit," Grenier zooms out to offer an urban overview, reflecting on city planning, urban gardeners working in memory of George Floyd, and the distinct motivations humans harbor to tame nature. Do we plant gardens to make something beautiful? To conquer it? Or, as in Minneapolis, to heal? The geometry of the black man-his cells, building to organs, pulsing blood through lungs-is "perfect," she writes. More perfect than the curated rose, which-can't we all see that rose as the destructive ideal of a so-called gentleman by now? I am wowed by the way the poet asks me to re-see the elements in light of human violence, to consider "the velvet crust the spade turns." - Sara Sams, author of Atom City

Each of these poems touches down and merges so completely with a love for the "perfect geometry" of the imperfect world. Long before picking up the pen, Grenier must be leaning, resolutely, devotedly, "nosing like pigs in the golden dust" toward the conscious streaming of a poetry beyond any single poet. I want a nose like that. I want to learn to lean like that.-Farid MatukIn Our Now plunges its readers into urgent and musical currents as poet and visual artist Valyntina Grenier rewires and rewilds the language of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire. These poems command us to "lounge in queerness," "call the flower sex-worker" and "hear the bees leeward/ nosing like pigs through golden dust." Grenier invents a new form that distills the language of love, science, and nature to produce a necessary elixir for our contemporary moment. These poems give us hope in the improvisations of the natural world and the ways that language can bend towards its representation. "Trashed lilies lean in," Grenier tells us. "Accept the invitation/ into their throats of nectar."-Susan Briante"[O]rdinary vision/is a hinge/crowded with flowers." So begins my (our!) lucky chance to experience the world through Valyntina Grenier's capacious (and beyond ordinary) vision - a vision that is brilliant in its ability to help us know the world and ourselves through all of our senses (read these lines aloud, feel them slip and clap in your mouth), enlarging the often simplified statement that "People are nature" to include all of the grandeur and violence and banality such a statement can, and must, mean. Grenier has both witnessed and provoked the "trashed lilies" (of my body and the earth) to "punch the air" and I could not be more grateful to be in this company.-TC Tolbert

Valyntina Grenier’s FEVER DREAM / TAKE HEART marks a poetic “double debut” with a tête-bêche chapbook, two titles bound upside-down with two front covers, which can be read from either side.  The poems shape their sense from sound, but do not hesitate to critique/navigate/decipher reality with a feminist protest. Associative and dreamy, the poems also prove to be starkly political.  They explore how we are miraculously alive in the midst of degrading political and weather systems. Some of the poems derive their initial lexicon from source texts, but they all confront the tenderness and violence that mark our human natures.  With subtle humor, word play, and linguistic inventions, Grenier has written a surprising tour de force whose discrete short books, taken together, range from the sexual and sinister to the prayerful and divine. Valyntina Grenier is a poet and visual artist living in Tucson, Arizona. She was born in Lancaster, California, and educated at The University of California, Berkeley, and St. Mary’s College, Moraga. Graduating with an MFA in poetry, she is self-taught as a painter, installation and Neon artist. In both language and visual art, she pushes the boundaries of representation and abstraction to create a vantage from which to view violence and prejudice. An LGBTQIA artist and activist, her work has appeared in Lana Turner, JuxtaProse, Cathexis Northwest Press and Bat City Review.