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Sadness of the Apex Predator
Available for Order 
Sadness of the Apex Predator

A Mastiff named Tiny, Seattle in the 70s, a house fire that interrupts a girl's life, a predatory mother who attends to her wounded daughter and the many predatory men who swoop in when the destabilized woman is loosed into the world, all of this is woven throughout Sadness of the Apex Predator, a collection of poems that studies both the way Sapiens feed on one another and also the redemption our hungers can bring. Order Sadness of the Apex Predator HERE!

Praise for Sadness of the Apex Predator

Dion O’Reilly's Sadness of the Apex Predator is a tour de force with urgent poems that address the perilous present and the past that's gotten us here. She writes astonishing poems of her personal history of severe abuse and world history of severe abuse. She even contemplates poets taking "a break/ from our ruined selves/ in favor of our ruined country." A burn survivor, O'Reilly writes visceral poems addressing not only the pain but also vulnerability—"I had no skin./I’m sorry. I had no skin." In later poems she returns to the body—its pleasure and difficulties. These are wonderful and necessary poems.- Denise Duhamel author of Second Story

Ghost Dogs

Ghost Dogs is the winner of the Independent Press award for poetry, the Dragonfly award for poetry, the Pinnacle Achievement Award for Poetry, an Honorable Mention in the Eric Hoffer Award, and took third place in the Royal Dragonfly Book Award.

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Royal DragonFly Book Award
Pinnacle Book Achievement Award
Eric Hoffer Award

3rd Place 2020

2020 for Poetry

2020 for Poetry

Ghost Dogs by Dion O'Reilly

Ghost Dogs, is available from Terrapin Books and anywhere you get your books!

Bookshop Santa Cruz
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Praise for Ghost Dogs

Dion O’Reilly’s Ghost Dogs is polished, powerful, and deeply rooted in the landscape of the Pacific West. The poems tell a compelling story of a life with many challenges, exalted by a sense of the marvelous. Her writing sings with astonishingly fresh imagery, and fully experienced emotion. The poems touch every sense, her metaphors are strikingly original. Ghost Dogs gives a summation of a life, with the poet finding wells of emotion in the most unlikely places—a pig about to be shot by a butcher, or a thumb she sucked until well into adulthood. There is such a fierce appetite in this book, a hunger for the depths and heights of human experience, described with abandon mixed with great refinement.

—Zack Rogow, author of Irreverent Litanies and The Number Before Infinity

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