“ Brynne Rebele-Henry’s Prelude travels through time and space to commune with one of history’s great literary saints, St. Catherine of Sienna. As the two writers’ language braids together, so too does their loneliness, their prayer, their desperate and palpable yearning. “In the darkness, I whispered hymns like they could keep me,” begins one poem, and it’s as if both women are speaking at once. Prelude is richly researched and exquisitely rendered, an unforgettable collection.”

“Raya and Sarah’s story is a credit to Rebele-Henry’s own teen voice, mature beyond her years. The emotionally dramatic narrative . . . rings incredibly true.”

“The love between these two girls is the beating heart of this novel, and this romance combined with the intense masquerade they must constantly perform, ‘just pretending’ their feelings away, is where Rebele-Henry succeeds at portraying the aching duality of being queer in an environment that will not allow it . . . Orpheus Girl is a modern epic that helps us think about the older epics, and what they have still to offer us.”

“I learned early that beauty is violence, proclaims the speaker in Autobiography of a Wound. That a wound can speak for itself, and have its own personal history, is in and of itself an arresting idea. Brynne Rebele-Henry complicates that idea in poems that live and breathe in an adamant but prayerful darkness punctuated by small poppies, rosaries, white silk pants, sewing needles. Autobiography of a Wound is unafraid to stand at the edge of any precipice, and Rebele-Henry is unafraid to confront the darkness that lives in any crevice.”

“Teenage wunderkind Rebele-Henry fills her debut collection with fractured, polyvocal, visceral engagements with darkness and pain...”

“Wise, startling, often painful reading from a poet to watch.”