NATHANAEL O'REILLY
Poet & Professor
Recent Works
Poems recently published in journals & anthologies can be found here.
Praise
Nathanael O’Reilly’s Boulevard achieves a poet’s holy mission to elevate and preserve the times one lives in with starkly rich, elegant, Hopper-like vignettes unfolding over time in the micro-view outside his window of one stretch of an American street while hunkering down during the initial period of the Covid-19 pandemic. The everyday is made new and unusual; the seemingly mundane, extraordinary. O’Reilly reminds us that poetry is the alchemy that gives us light, even from the darkest moments in the human experience.”
The keenly observed poems in (Un)belonging are palpable with tension, the push-pull between dislocation and home-making. O'Reilly's poems build, image upon acute image, each line freighted: longing, history, heartsickness and critique. Politically attuned and poignantly playful, this is O'Reilly's best yet. (Un)Belonging is a wonderful collection of poems."
O'Reilly encounters the world with the carefulness of a spy or a professional eavesdropper. Here are poems that notice the moment, all the time documenting the strangeness of the landscape in which our lives unfold. What does it mean to belong? In what states of being do our various lost and found selves exist? This exciting new collection bears witness to the pilgrim nature of a life that might be ours, and the timely question of how a person becomes remembered, in time and space, through the eyes of others. History is a foretold territory that stretches out of the past and far ahead into the distance... As always, O'Reilly is a compelling and expert navigator along the road."
Matt Hohner
Author of Thresholds and Other Poems (Apprentice House, 2018).
Alex Lemon
Author of Another Last Day (Milkweed, 2019)
Annemarie Ní Churreáin,
Author of The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021)
Bio
Photo by Celeste Jenkins-O'Reilly
Nathanael O'Reilly is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His thirteen poetry collections include Dublin Wandering (Recent Work Press, 2024); Landmarks (Lamar University Literary Press, 2024); Selected Poems of Ned Kelly (Downingfield Press, 2024); Boulevard (Downingfield Press, 2024); Dear Nostalgia (above/ground press, 2023); (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020); Blue (above/ground press, 2020); Preparations for Departure (UWAP, 2017); Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015); Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011); and Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010). More than 350 of his poems have appeared in 130 journals & anthologies published in 15 countries, including Anthropocene, Cordite Poetry Review, fourW, Howl: New Irish Writing, In Parentheses: New Modernisms, New World Writing Quarterly, Mascara Literary Review, Meanjin, Southword and Westerly. He is the poetry editor for Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.
