Objects of Hunger

"In her strongest poems, Belli's styptic precision amounts to a vigilance verging on a cosmogony. She is perhaps the purest (not to mention most fiercely feminist) heir of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Siegfried Sassoon: where there is blood there is also the promise of intimacy, and a gauge by which to measure it, whether she's speaking of war, romantic passion, or childbirth. These are stately poems that cut toward the reader, then offer themselves up as bandages."--G. C. Waldrep, author of feast gently and Testament

"In these playful and ethereal poems that constitute E.C. Belli's intimate debut collection, the poet seeks for Seamus Heaney's 'immortelles of perfect pitch, ' in which each word glows and hums a tune, an emotion, an observation, a (non)-narrative or lyrical detail . . . 'My feet are short sentences, ' she muses. Of books and their lives, she thinks out loud, 'I remember / going home, / letting their names / out into the fields.' At once simple and complex, these polished verses feel like pebbles, other times strings. They also remind me of haikus, their art of seduction, distance, and understatement. Despite their hunger and deceivingly short breath, Belli's 'poetic objects' are fresh, intelligent, and sensitive to the presence--or absence--of an elusive 'other' an otherworldly existence and realm where one might be reticent to name the absolute, yet ready to embrace the unseen and unknown."--Fiona Sze-Lorrain, author of The Ruined Elegance, My Funeral Gondola, and Water the Moon