Overview

We Both Say is a debut collection by Jake Reynolds that maps a long-distance relationship across difference, distance, and the persistent interference of the world's larger crises. The poems move between letters, dreams, storms, and time zones, finding in the gap between two people a space both intimate and politically charged. Reynolds works across forms, from the sestina to loose prose poems and fragmented lyric, with a tonal range that encompasses dry wit, tenderness, and a clear-eyed awareness of how climate, borders, and geopolitics complicate even the most private desires. The collection is alert to the comedy and the exhaustion of mediated connection, to the rituals of waiting, and to the strange temporal disorientation of loving someone whose day begins as yours ends. Throughout, the writing maintains a precision and an earned restraint, resisting sentimentality even as it takes romantic feeling seriously as a subject worthy of formal attention.

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9781918628975

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Reviews

This combination of tenderness and estrangement is a real gift. Reynolds has that rare talent of taking language - and the love, the confusion, the missed and met connections that follow in its wake - to somewhere truly new. He can cut through the most elegantly circuitous thought with a momentary glance to camera; a confidence; a hand up out of the maelstrom. I love this collection and cannot recommend it highly enough. - Luke Kennard Jake Reynolds' We Both Say is a sequence in which the distance and intimacy of twenty-first-century life meet brilliantly as poetry. Sweet, dry, full of imaginary catastrophes and very funny, it reminds me of Frank O'Hara's observation that 'when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives'. Filled with a beautifully fluent music of observation, this is a book to take on a plane even if you aren't catching a plane: 'earbuds and silk mask ready / juice in the chargeables'. - Jeremy Noel-Tod

Author Information

Jake Reynolds is a poet from Lincoln. He currently lives and works in Norwich. In 2025, he completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia. His writing has been published widely online and in print. We Both Say is his first book.

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