Books
Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around
Glass Lyre Press
Publication Date: February 2025
ISBN: 979-8-9916673-3-3
Retail Price: $16.00
Haunted by the ghosts of Eadweard and Flora Muybridge and framed by the inescapable cage of family, Virginia Bell’s formally adventurous Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around is a captivating work of poetic imagination, capturing in words what even a camera typically can’t.
~ Kathleen Rooney, author of Where Are the Snows
There’s a constant internal shifting to Virginia Bell’s Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around that unsteadies you. It is not a book that uses poetry to recount grief, or even to contain it. It’s a book that allows grief to disfigure the form itself. The result is a collection that doesn’t just describe instability—it becomes it. What’s so striking about Bell’s work is not that she writes about fragmentation, but that she builds her very poems out of it. The grief she carries—for her mother, her brother, her own complicities and failings—is never delivered in neat confessions or cathartic colloquialisms. Instead, it arrives as syntax that breaks mid-thought, as lines that stammer and vanish, as structures that begin to hold but then unravel. It arrives, in other words, not as subject matter, but as form. Or more aptly, collapsed form. […]
Lifting Child from the Ground, Turning Around doesn’t settle. And that’s its brilliance. These poems don’t try to contain the brokenness—they move like it, breathe like it, break like it. We are left not with answers, but with motion. We are kept in the turning. The lifting. The breath caught mid-gesture.”
~ Giovanni Olla, New City Magazine
Many of Bell’s poems are in conversation with those who’ve passed away—not just a grieving for her still-living mother who is no longer the same person, but also for her brother who died. And the title poem is a conversation with a friend who’s passed away, about time spent after the friend’s death with the friend’s daughter: “We talked / about the invisibility of grief” (p. 96) the speaker reports to her friend. And it is the attempt to untangle and uncover those invisible things that make this book compelling. Ultimately, the poetic undertaking is not only one of discovery—the way the Inventor is trying to discover the invisible mechanics of motion—but one of reclamation in the midst of grief, and as such is a true work of poetic imagination.
~ Brian Satrom, MAYDAY MAGAZINE
From the Belly
Sibling Rivalry Press
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.
“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.”
~ Chris Green, Epiphany School
