From the Belly by Virginia Bell

$14.95
From the Belly by Virginia Bell

From the Belly by Virginia Bell
Publication Date: September 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937420-23-9
Retail Price: $14.95; 68 Pages

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: Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God; Mark Doty’s My Alexandria, 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; Rita Dove’s Grace Notes; Heather McHugh’s Hinge and Sign; Adrienne Rich’s Midnight Salvage; Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjectionl Sally Mann’s Immediate Family (photography).

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.