A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep - Paperback

by E. C. Belli (Author)

Winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Belli hands the stage to a luminous constancy in this deftly lyrical and incisive collection. Structured around a central poem, Billet Doux, which is a love letter to the bones--and their persistence when faced with the solemnity of ruin--these magnetic poems are illuminations, repositories for strong-willed, existential deliberations, and stoic reckonings of the ravaged, lone self and its forsaken thou. A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep cuts to the bone with its sensual turns and its linguistic ingenuity.

One introductory poem and four parts compose this volume, whose spirit is one of melancholic yet decisive persistence uttered in spare, spellbinding truths. A first section reckons with failed intimacy in terse and articulate lines that pace the small universes that are each one of Belli's poems. In a letter to the bones, which constitutes the temperamental and winged second section, the bones are dear companions that cannot be left, for, in their absence, the speaker asks, what would be left to break? The third section is inhabited by a shrewd stoicism that works to preserve the speaker from certain terror and keep a loosening grip on reality at bay. Lucidly, the speaker finds a sometimes cutting strength: I am... more of a household chemical / flammable / and if misused / will stain the skin. In the final section, an imaginary constitutes itself through the light of the surreal and a sultry lyricism. Although an ancient nakedness is being held against its will and to live is to learn to be barely there, the speaker hopefully begins considering the dahlias.

Belli's vision is tender and daring, at times indignant, but always intending to grasp with authenticity our transactions with intimacy through a succinct and pointed verse, whether the self lies face down in the grime or whether it is aimed at the sun.

Back Jacket

E.C. Belli's poems are magical. Her poems are intense lyrical distillates, capturing sorrow, or melancholy, or dreamy reverie through the alchemy of music that pulls at my heartstrings. Her poems are lullabies, lamentations, love songs, apostrophes to alter egos that praise the inclement weather of our interior moods. Whimsical, sultry and weighted with grief, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep is a collection of poems existing on a plane that is between waking and sleeping; it is a portrait of a beautiful and exquisitely perceptive subconscious. -- Cathy Park Hong, Judge, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered "Some people say it's a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it's a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love." Reading E.C. Belli's sensational A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli's remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, "little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me." The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what its made. In this collection, stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem "Hues" is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I'll be learning from for years. -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell