Renée’s poetry is informed by the expansive landscape of northern New Mexico as well as by journeys to Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, India, Bali, the Himalayas, Italy, and Greece. In her work it is evident that she loves foreignness as well as form. Her long-time practice of the Japanese martial art aikido taught her what it means to occupy form through the body. Her poems emerge from the blood and heart of the everyday as much as from her travels.
Originally from Boston, Renée has lived in New Mexico since 1985. Her first home was in Taos where she moved after earning a Masters’ degree in creative writing from Antioch University, London. With a few like-minded others, she founded and edited The Taos Review, one of New Mexico’s foremost literary journals. At present, Renée is a co-founder of the publishing collective, Tres Chicas Books, alongside Joan Logghe and Miriam Sagan. Their collaborative book, Love & Death: Greatest Hits won the New Mexico book award for poetry.
Beside publishing many volumes of poems over the past four decades, Renée has worked as a freelance literary editor, a proofreader and drafter for the state legislature, a writing teacher and a somatic coach. She’s taught poetry around the state and served as a visiting professor at Colorado College. She and her husband, John Brandi, led a course for San Juan College students in Chiapas, Mexico, on crafting poems from travel. Renée and John sometimes work on a poetic dialogue after traveling together—the Press at the Palace of the Governors published one such exchange in Road to the Cloud’s House, prose poems based on their observations in Chiapas, in a limited-edition letterpress volume. Her work is also included in the Palace Press’s special boxed edition of poetry broadsides, Word Art.
Of her work, Joanne Kyger says: Renée Gregorio knows and sees where she is—in her body, her place, herself. She finds courage in navigating the dark of deep waters. And Anne Valley-Fox writes: These candid and graceful poems form an intimate weave of inner and outer form. …they support a multitude of realities...yet, how light they are! In them, earth-nature and human-nature see eye to eye, heart to heart. These are poems to be received into the body, like breath.
Of her first book, the poet Robin Becker says: Gregorio's women give voice to our twin longings for individual identity and relationship. She articulates the tangle of our desires in bold and nuanced language. And of her second book, John Nichols says: It has a quiet yet passionate intensity, richly connected to earth and to the yearning and scary rhythms and rites of true loving. The intimacy is both gentle and unafraid...
And of her latest collection, Abyss & Bridge, Tom Ireland writes: Renée Gregorio’s poems take on the never-finished work of acceptance. Along the way, her love of the physical world and its creatures transports me to a country of praise, thanksgiving, and rhapsody.
2020