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, 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