What Small Sound
PRESS RELEASE
Bell’s second collection of poems offers a portrait of motherhood, devastation, and hope.
- Kirkus Review, starred reviewFrancesca Bell's book What Small Sound is gorgeous, raw, and disarmingly honest beginning to end. Her poems encompass the scope of her life, her family's life, plus her generous and empathetic assessment of the larger world. She writes of a struggle to be "normal" in the fiery, broken, unpredictable chaos she sees around her. With skill and passion, she speaks of love, of rape, of deafness, or of holding still for a tarantula, of why she doesn't drink, of who left fingerprints on the bullets of the Las Vegas shooter, or of a mammogram that made her think of the Mars rover. Two quotes of hers from very different poems are unforgettable: "I can't navigate to a life of before/and keep falling face-flat against after." And still: "I want to feel what's next/curled inside me, tight as fists." Read this book. You will keep wanting to find what's after, and you won't forget any of it.
—Susan Terris, Present Tense
Francesca Bell’s poems fish wonder and gratitude and eros from a world brushed by grief and illness and violence. I celebrate this poet’s tender commitments to remaining open, especially after loss and even when tragedy triggers an instinct to shelter or retreat. In this way, Bell turns our degrees of separation into songs for contact. The poetic praying found in What Small Sound feels like the grace our moment needs.
—Geffrey Davis
