Available Soon for Pre-Order from Glass Lyre Press (2024)
Cover Art: Birute Sodeikaite, from the stop-motion short film In Perpetuum (2023)
Virginia Bell’s poems are ekphrastic-driven meditations on motherhood, movement, and grief where Muybridge’s photographs serve as an unlikely muse to challenge the male gaze and to delve into the “hidden eye” of “grief-time.” “The Ultimate End-of-Life Checklist,” the centerpiece of the collection, is a crown of free verse sonnets on the absurd mundanity surrounding the winnowing of her mother’s life. The collection often alternates between prose poems and free verse sonnets, ironic forms that belie the chaos of managing the mess of life. Bell is a flaneur of memory. If an essay is the meandering movement of the mind and a lyric poem a moment in time, then Bell’s poems thrive on the taut tension between the two.
~ Steven Teref, author of Man Without Qualities
In this stunning new collection, Virginia Bell explores what she describes as “the box of the mind” in all of its complexity. Bell’s poetic speaker is a restless explorer, always looking, interrogating, doubting, and then landing on surprising insights. Through a range of forms and modes, these beautiful, deeply intelligent poems explore what we collect, what we disregard, what we refuse to forget, and what we grieve. I will return to this work again and again.
~ Joanne Diaz, author of The Lessons
Virginia Bell is our poet-hero in Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around as she guides us through acts of caregiving for the ‘death-near’ in our lives, of grappling with the grief of loved ones gone too soon, of mothering grown sons while mindful of all the meanings of ‘mother.’ With formal dexterity and expertly handled knowledge, these are poems that peel back the sheen of memories and art like skin to reveal blemishes and scars, old wounds and aches, ugly truths which are ultimately beautiful [insert Keats lines about beauty and truth here]. You’ll want to lift this book from the ground and turn the pages over and over again.
~ Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown
~ Steven Teref, author of Man Without Qualities
In this stunning new collection, Virginia Bell explores what she describes as “the box of the mind” in all of its complexity. Bell’s poetic speaker is a restless explorer, always looking, interrogating, doubting, and then landing on surprising insights. Through a range of forms and modes, these beautiful, deeply intelligent poems explore what we collect, what we disregard, what we refuse to forget, and what we grieve. I will return to this work again and again.
~ Joanne Diaz, author of The Lessons
Virginia Bell is our poet-hero in Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around as she guides us through acts of caregiving for the ‘death-near’ in our lives, of grappling with the grief of loved ones gone too soon, of mothering grown sons while mindful of all the meanings of ‘mother.’ With formal dexterity and expertly handled knowledge, these are poems that peel back the sheen of memories and art like skin to reveal blemishes and scars, old wounds and aches, ugly truths which are ultimately beautiful [insert Keats lines about beauty and truth here]. You’ll want to lift this book from the ground and turn the pages over and over again.
~ Jacob Saenz, author of Throwing the Crown