I’ve Named the Goddamned Ravens is two firsts in one fell swoop: Irene’s debut poetry collection, and Common Meter Press’s first full chapbook.

Irene writes thoughtfully with strands of metaphors and mythology woven through grief, a time of unraveling, and uncertainties presented by the pandemic as well as personal losses.

This poetry collection will connect you to emotional depths and help you find a way through whatever you might be going through. Lean on Irene’s works as she navigates love, matters of the heart, and life in an isolated world.

Irene Loy weaves raw, unrequited tenderness for place and person into these intimate poems of longing and loss, of braided roots and roots torn up. At heart is the question of how and where to love, and how one should be loved. Images of nature, solitude, rivers, stones, and alchemy conspire, suggesting something of Plath or O’Keeffe in the deserts of the southwest, and invoking Cixous in an écriture féminine that is both introspective and resolute.
– James Reich, author of The Moth for the Star