Francesca Bell

Description:

Beloved by contemporary German readers, the poetry of Max Sessner is gathered for the first time in English in Whoever Drowned Here: New and Selected Poems. Painstakingly chosen from Sessner’s celebrated three collections and from new work, these poems employ a matter-of-fact magical realism to engage the profound, philosophical mysteries of the everyday. Sessner makes nimble use of the material world as he choreographs poignant reenactments of human yearning. Smocks in the window of a dry cleaner “trade stolen / caresses” at night. Death tries on your clothes while you sleep and eats your chocolate. A poem tires of being a poem, “a small mortal / thing that no one notices,” and sets off into the world to make a new life. The poems of Max Sessner are like compact, musical fairytales. They delight us and frighten us. They touch us with their ghostly, melancholy fingertips and lead us onward.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Dreamlike is a place to begin, one of many inadequate ways I might speak of the poems of Max Sessner. Liquid is better, as his poems move like water and surprise me by revealing spaces between objects and people, between moods and moments that I didn’t know existed. If this book were a house, it’d be on the edge of town and have a tree growing through its roof; a river, it’d know your name but never quite make it to the sea; a photo, the person you miss most would be in it but turned around and looking the other way. In searching for passages to quote that would give you a sense of the imagination and vitality of Sessner’s work, its strangely touching warmth, I found it impossible to excise a portion of a poem without including the whole. Lifelike, then, is what I’ll end with, or better yet, alive.”

—Bob Hicok, author of Red Rover Red Rover

“In Francesca Bell’s nimble and swift translations, Max Sessner’s poems come across from German into English with a deft sureness and dramatic delicacy. The wry, sometimes ironic, voice and point of view of these poems is also probing of the shadow mysteries that animate our everyday lives. Silence, loneliness, unsettled companionship, chaste assertion, and everywhere a sense of shifting depths—Sessner’s poems observe what we miss, and ask us to look again. They are quietly confident about what they know, and what they offer is the kind of value we find only in real poems. I’m grateful to have them.”

—Joshua Weiner, author of Berlin Notebook

Description:

Francesca Bell’s second collection of poems, What Small Sound, interrogates what it means to be a mother in a country where there are five times as many guns as children; female in a country where a woman is raped every two minutes; and citizen of a world teeming with iniquities and peril. In poems rich in metaphor and music and unflinching in their gaze, Bell offers us an exacting view of the audiologist’s booth and the locked ward as she grapples with the gradual loss of her own hearing and the mental illness spreading its dark wings over her family. This is a book of plentiful sorrows but also of small and sturdy comforts, a book that chronicles the private, lonely life of the body as well as its tender generosities. What Small Sound wrestles with some of the broadest, most complicated issues of our time and also with the most fundamental issue of all: love. How it shelters and anchors us. How it breaks us and, ultimately, how it pieces us back together.

Casebound: $22.00

ADVANCE PRAISE

Francesca Bell’s book What Small Sound is gorgeous, raw, and disarmingly honest beginning to end. Her poems encompass the scope of her life, her family’s life, plus her generous and empathetic assessment of the larger world. She writes of a struggle to be “normal” in the fiery, broken, unpredictable chaos she sees around her. With skill and passion, she speaks of love, of rape, of deafness, or of holding still for a tarantula, of why she doesn’t drink, of who left fingerprints on the bullets of the Las Vegas shooter, or of a mammogram that made her think of the Mars rover. Two quotes of hers from very different poems are unforgettable: “I can’t navigate to a life of before / and keep falling face-flat against after.” And still: “I want to feel what’s next / curled inside me, tight as fists.” Read this book. You will keep wanting to find what’s after, and you won’t forget any of it.

—Susan Terris, author of Familiar Tense

Francesca Bell’s poems fish wonder and gratitude and eros from a world brushed by grief and illness and violence. I celebrate this poet’s tender commitments to remaining open, especially after loss and even when tragedy triggers an instinct to shelter or retreat. In this way, Bell turns our degrees of separation into songs for contact. The poetic praying found in What Small Sound feels like the grace our moment needs.

—Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler

Description:

Unapologetically sensual and forthright, Bright Stain explores desire, loss, faith, doubt, tenderness, and violence; and sex as experience, metaphor, and magnifying lens for relationships.

Bright Stain may or may not become the Sex and the City of poetry, but this knock-your-socks-off debut will likely inspire debate—perhaps controversy—as it inhabits some startling points of view, including pedophile priests’, serial killers’ and prison inmates’. Those who miss reading these breathtaking, visceral poems won’t know what their friends are raving about.

ADVANCE PRAISE

“Francesca Bell’s poems are fierce and tender, passionate, compassionate, disturbing and delightful. Wide-ranging, finely-honed, smart and surprising, Bright Stain is a compelling debut collection!”—Ellen Bass

“How deeply gratifying to see Francesca Bell’s electric, erotic, and completely ravishing debut collection, Bright Stain, at last in the world. For the past ten years she has been writing some of the most charged, subtle, and yet devastating poems in American poetry. Many of these dramatic vignettes are laced with a rare sexual candor and a whip-smart emotional intelligence. Bright Stain is one of the most darkly elegant and luminous books of recent years; it is, in all ways, truly a wonder.”—David St. John