NOW AVAILABLE for PRE-ORDER from SIBLING RIVALRY PRESS Virginia Bell’s “From the Belly”
“Imagine that things called color and taste and sex
-indeed the knotted thing called family–
were a constant revelation…”
– Ralph Hamilton, Editor of RHINO Magazine
* * *
$11.96 if pre-ordered!
$14.95; ISBN: 978-1-937420-23-9
6 x 9 Perfect-Bound Paperback; 68 Pages
Review Copies and Author Interviews Available
Publisher Telephone: (870) 723-6008
Publisher Email: info@siblingrivalrypress.com
Author Email: bluebellhome@sbcglobal.net
ABOUT THE BOOK
In From the Belly, Virginia Bell opens the doors to a gallery of poetic meditations – on the tenderness of childhood and motherhood, the primal pleasures of food and sex, and the joyful aches of family and memory. The poems are by turns ekphrastic and self-consciously confessional, taking inspiration from the art of everyday things.
Influenced by and suggested if you enjoy the following: Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God; Mark Doty’s My Alexandria and School of the Arts; Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard; Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot; Lisel Mueller’s Alive Together; Louise Gluck’s The Wild Iris; Rita Dove’s Selected Poems; Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems and Letters; Marie Howe’s What the Living Do; Christina Pugh’s Restoration; Ruth Stone’s Ordinary Words; Heather McHugh’s Hinge and Sign; Adrienne Rich’s Midnight Salvage; the photography of Sally Mann.
Chris Green, author of Epiphany School, says: “Virginia Bell’s From the Belly is pure pleasure and expertise. Poetry about all home matters secret, scary, and sweet. The body and its generations, our food and art. Poems both comfortable and ominous folded in fine linen but spotted with blood. The book, like a series of intimate paintings and photographs, is perfectly stilled. Bell is never hurried, and the reader is aware throughout of her technical skill, love, common sense, vision, and magnificence.”
Alice George, author of This Must be the Place, says: “Like a painter who rejoices in the wrestle between abstraction and representation, Virginia Bell’s poems respect and illuminate their earthly triggers while transforming this world through an impressive craft and compression.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Virginia Bell’s poetry has appeared in CALYX, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women, The Mom Egg, Poet Lore, Pebble Lake Review, Wicked Alice, Ekphrasis, Contrary Magazine, Woman Made Gallery’s Her Mark: a Journal of Art and Poetry, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, as well as in the anthologies Brute Neighbors: Urban Nature Poetry, Prose and Photography, and A Writers’ Congress: Chicago Poets on Barack Obama’s Inauguration. Bell has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and has published articles on activist writers such as Eduardo Galeano and Leslie Marmon Silko, and also the Instructor’s Resource Manual for Beyond Borders: A Cultural Reader (Houghton Mifflin, 2003). She is an associate editor with RHINO Magazine and an adjunct professor at Loyola University Chicago, where she particularly enjoys teaching courses on Women in Literature and Early American Literature.
Located just outside of Little Rock, Arkansas, Sibling Rivalry Press develops, publishes, and promotes outlaw artistic talent. Our aim is to cultivate literary and poetic rock stars. We are also home to Assaracus, one of Library Journal‘s Best New Magazines.
Learn more at www.siblingrivalrypress.com.
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