Tall Grass With Violence - FutureCycle Press, 2022
"I keep rereading Tall Grass with Violence, Rachel Marie Patterson’s remarkable full-length debut collection. An intensity of observation pervades these concisely crafted poems whose resonant details and images create a shared sense of ominous perception. These are haunted landscapes—from Metairie, Louisiana to Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts—unforgettably voiced and nuanced." —Stuart Dischell, Author of Good Hope Road
"What a book, what a book! I want to read it over and over. Here is the domestic scene infiltrated by world events. Here is motherhood in the face of climate change. Here is violence against daughters. Here, with such beauty, imagery and music, humor and wild juxtapositions, Rachel Marie Patterson names those unutterable things that you need to be named. I want to say Tall Grass with Violence is breathtaking, when I mean to say that it is breath-making—such sighs of recognition and pathos. Here is despair mitigated by love. Here is the ethos of this marvel of a book that works and plays, reaches out to the reader, gives purpose, reasons to carry on, and the imperative to put one foot in front of the other with whatever joy you gather—to survive not with less, but with more, much more, largeness of spirit." —Aliki Barnstone, Poet Laureate of Missouri, 2016-2019
If I Am Burning - Main Street Rag, 2011
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"The poems in If I Am Burning investigate how the female body is touched, pierced, adorned, tampered with, judged, and desired. What burns in these pages - yearning, outrage, compassion - burns in images that remain charred on the mind long after the reader puts the book away. This is a sharp-eyed and socially aware collection with a voice that can 'start / the stopped clock / in your jacket.'" -Melissa Range, author of Horse and Rider