Francesca Bell’s What Small Sound, Reviewed by Vivian Wagner
What Small Sound Francesca Bell Red Hen Press Reviewer: Vivian Wagner What Small Sound, a new poetry collection by Francesca Bell, is an exploration of life, death, and love, and of the myriad ways these essential elements of human existence intersect and define each other. The poems in this collection don’t offer any easy answers […]
Francesca Bell – After
After Once the body was wrenched whole from my body I deflated sank back into being ordinary a vessel returned purposeless to its shelf I hadn’t known until first the father and then the son swelled to fill my emptiness that I was a space a lack that walked through the world or danced or […]
Francesca Bell – Lightning Coming Closer All the Time
Lightning Coming Closer All the Time I can’t tell from here if the Lord is a sniper or a drunk guy with a shotgun. Whether He’s poised with His scalpel and scrubs or just reaching into His pickup for a hacksaw. I see my neighbor, raising a girl my daughter’s age, check into the hospital […]
Francesca Bell – Two Poems
Lessons My daughter dreads middle school science because all they study is cataclysm, end-stopped species after end-stopped species, earth’s slow dwindling. There is no longer a world to study that teems with life, not a globe ecstatic in its wild spinning. Day after day, they regard the crumbling edge, broken asphalt where a road runs […]
Francesca Bell’s Bright Stain, Reviewed by Cindy Hochman
Francesca Bell Bright Stain Red Hen Press Reviewer: Cindy Hochman The first poem in Francesca Bell’s sophisticated and street-wise collection Bright Stain begins, like any coming-of-age story worth its salt, with reluctant innocence. Little mouse, lying white on your side like a child in a christening dress— … but snake isn’t interested. … refusing to […]
