Praise for Reel:
“Plenty of us write a poem because we have ideas; Colleen O’Brien does the harder and rarer thing of materializing ideas because of poems. A truly singular work.” —Hannah Brooks-Motl, author of Ultraviolet of the Genuine
“O’Brien’s diced, archaic idiolect, in its haptic synaptic poetic scrutiny, becomes a ‘singularity radiance’ by which to see where we are.” —Andrew Zawacki, author of These Late Eclipses
“The poems in Reel are… at home in the unheimlich, “in the frothing ever breeding,” and their tools are wordplay, fragmentation, and a kind of insistent repetition that lulls and then, at the end of lulling, reveals.” —Michael Joseph Walsh, author of Innocence
Praise for All Roads:
“Colleen O’Brien’s gaze is unflinching and brutally tender, and the stories she tells capture the jangly rhythms of lived experience. These stories are smart and piercingly observant. They are subtly, almost scarily affecting.” —Daniel Orozco, author of Orientation and Other Stories
“Honest in its portrayal of life and all its foibles, heartfelt in its depiction of addiction and loss, and at times, funny as hell, All Roads is the perfect book for now and I couldn’t be more excited to see what O’Brien does next.” —Courtney Maum, author of Touch
“Colleen O’Brien perfectly captures and chronicles the lives of lapsed Catholic, Midwestern families shattered by divorce, alcoholism, domestic violence, dysfunction, and—perhaps most destructive of all— love: earnest, flailing, and too often insufficient. And here is O’Brien, picking up the shards and piecing them together as if to suggest that it is only by regarding ourselves through the fractured prism we call ‘family’ that we can ever make sense of our past, and ever hope to envision a future.” —Thisbe Nissen, author of How Other People Make Love
Praise for Spool in the Maze:
“For Colleen O’Brien, a word is myriad inside, like a geode. So is a sentence, so is a painting, so is a scribbled note whose “i” might be a semicolon or long-ago failure to make a lasting self. O’Brien is fascinated with the hesitations and swerves that are part of the process of human expression, and the delicate music and syntax she generates in the act of saying constitute an original and exquisite study of how we move, imperfectly and with hope, towards closure and form.” —Nancy Eimers, author of Oz
“These startling poems by Colleen O’Brien zigzag intuitively from the given lyric to the more experimental, and how refreshing for a reader to be drawn across that prism rather than encamped in aesthetics… so that when lyric and language are turned inside out it is in the service of a painstaking listening, and when the forms themselves fix the circumstances of the heart, there is still every breath, honed to hold.” —William Olsen, author of TechnoRage
Colleen O'Brien 