Texts From My Mom is a comfortable, read-in-a-single-sitting kind of chapbook that subtly sings some great familial song.

As the summer draws to a close, autumn, winter, and a variety of holidays—family holidays, not just No Mail holidays—are lining up in my peripheral vision. This means more texts from my Dad. Texts of some length from my Mom. Christie Ann Reynolds crafts an every-Mom that captures the lovable and strange relationship between parents and adult children in a technological age that makes every thought shareable (from “9:33 AM”):

Look at this crazy kitty!
Nuts like the rest of this bunch!

This chapbook is most pleasurable if read as autobiography. I’m thankful for text messaging and for the increased recorded contact between parents and their adult children. With poets, it’s even more fascinating—in Texts From My Mom, the reader gets to see bits of Reynolds through messages from her mother (from “12:18 AM”):

You probably think your mom is nuts
Yes just a little
Where do you think you get
Such an imagination

While some poetry projects conceived from text messages, emails, etc. result in lines of emojis and the hyper-hip ‘yr,’ Reynolds uses one of these sources to make this chapbook intensely personal and intimate.