Anne Carson

Sophocles

Bianca Stone

Disaster follows when Creon, King of Thebes, forbids Antigone to bury her brother whom he has declared a traitor.

Antigonick

What Is Otherwise Infinite: Poems

AParis Review Staff Pick and Most Anticipated Book of 2018 at NYLON, Bustle, Autostraddle, and more.

The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

Someone Else's Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts the human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else's Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

Someone Else's Wedding Vows

Bruce Smith

Bruce Bond

Carolyn Finney

Colum McCann

Philip Metres

Kazim Ali

Diana Whitney

Ru Freeman

Jerome Rothenberg

Fred D'Aguiar

Jeff Talarigo

Sheryl St. Germain

William Heyen

Cynthia Hogue

Arthur Sze

Nin Andrews

Dominique Christina

Kristina Marie Darling

Remica Bingham-Risher

Shara McCallum

Shin Yu Pai

Mihaela Moscaliuc

Tanure Ojaide

Carol Moldaw

Michael Waters

Angelique Palmer

Rita Banerjee

Tim Seibles

Haleh Liza Gafori

Morowa Yejide

Christal Brown

Dante DiStefano

Claire Bateman

Nell-Lynn Perera

D. M. Aderibigbe

Christine Gelineau

H.L. Hix

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees

Felice Belle

Alycia D. Jenkins

Diane Raptosh

Lynn Kozak

Steven Reese

Jeff Diteman

Damon Honeycutt

Rashidah Ismaili Abu-Baker

Sign & Breath is a new critical anthology that takes a different approach to exploring these questions: What is poetry? What defines voice? Featuring a range of contemporary artists, many of whom work across different mediums and genres, Sign & Breath introduces the reader to one page that sings in any genre – prose, fiction, poetry, spoken word, hybrid forms, and song – across diverse traditions. Rather than define poetry as a genre with conventions, traditions, codes, and modalities, this book features poetry as a faculty that thrums in all written and spoken art. Readers are introduced to a text followed by a discussion with the author about creating the piece, ties to creative lineage, and the definition of voice through their practice. This anthology contributes to the dialogue among genres which will reframe understanding of poetry as an aesthetic experience of language. With one page that sings in any genre, Sign & Breath presents a new, inclusive perspective on poetry while two questions remain: Do we have a clearer understanding of what defines poetry? Do we have a clearer understanding of voice?

Sign & Breath

Finalist for the New England Book Award in Poetry and the Vermont Book Award As heard on NPR Morning Edition A New York Public Library Best Book of 2022 A searching, startling new collection of poems from the author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows Written in four sections with incisive and vivid lyrical language, Bianca Stone’s What Is Otherwise Infinite considers how we find our place in the world through themes of philosophy, religion, environment, myth, and psychology. “I deal only in the hardest pain-revivers, symbols and tongues,” writes Stone. “I want to tell you only / in the intimacy of our discomfort.” Populated by Archangels, limping in paradise; by allergies of the soul; the intimacy and danger of motherhood; psychic wounds; and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake, What Is Otherwise Infinite deftly examines our inherent and inherited ideas of how to live, and the experience of the Self—which on one hand is so intensely personal, and on the other, universal.

The air was like a bullet made out of silk... so begins Bianca Stone's I Saw the Devil with His Needlework. In the three long poems that make up this chapbook, Stone explores the double nature of love in ways that seem simultaneously timeless and new.

I Saw the Devil with His Needlework

Beautiful mutants, vagabond scuba divers, lovers with disordered gorilla hearts: These poetry comics place the lyric and the grotesque, the elegant and the despondent, side by side in one emotionally intense panel after another. At the vanguard of a movement that embraces our increasingly visual culture and believes poetry has an essential place therein, Bianca Stone redefines how we think about poetry, what we expect from comics, and how we interpret our own lives. Although reminiscent of illuminations by William Blake, Thomas Phillips's A Humument, and more recent visual-poetic hybrids by Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey, Stone's comics feature a mixture of dreamy expression and absurdist wit that is entirely her own. Her watercolor panels are filled with anthropomorphic horses and baffled ballerinas that guide the reader through the poet's graphic dreamscape: "I was moving like a monsoon through a forest. I was thinking about where I saw myself in two thousand years... And where I saw myself was a tiny subspace ripple sliding through the corridors with a plastic horse in my hand." This book, its own small universe, erases genre distinctions between the visual and the literary, and offers readers a poetic vision of artistic possibilities.

Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours

Bianca Stone

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