Martine Bellen

Martine Bellen’s third poetry collection taps into the irrepressible and often chaotic spirit which inspires artistic expression. With her swirling, luxuriant images, Bellen explores philosophical fragments from ancient Greece, religious rituals, the lives of historical women who transgressed the perceived boundaries of femininity. Here is slave-turned-activist Sojourner Truth holding court with Abraham Lincoln; here are Pocahontas, Calamity Jane, the outlaw Belle Starr, and Lola Montez, who, after becoming the Queen of Bavaria lit out for the gold rush of the American Frontier. Each woman has her poem and each poem arcs to the others, creating an electric portrait of life’s possibilities.
 
Erratum: Copper Canyon Press printed an incorrect credit to the artist whose work appears on the cover of The Vulnerability of Order. The image on the cover is “untitled (butterflies and braids),” 1994, by Gregory Crewdson, courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, NY. Our apologies for any confusion this caused.

The Vulnerability of Order

Bradford Morrow

Lee Smith

In the magnanimous tradition of Henry James's Hawthorn, Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael and Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson, our fall issue will present innovative homages by a diverse group of important contemporary American writers in honor of our great forebears and predecessors. In these iconoclastic (break the icons) and post-canonical (quash the canon) times, what better way to review the directions in which literature may now be headed, than to rethink where it has been?

Tributes

Conjunctions

Poetry. "Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging." Peter Matthiessen "Martine Bellen is a poet of refreshing complexity. Her unpredictable disjunctions and conjunctions and her baroque mix of vivid images and meticulous abstractions make one uncertain whether these poems (in verse composed of prose segments) are precise narrations of the contingent or of dreams or of the former masquerading as the latter. They are full of surprises." Jackson Mac Low "Martine Bellen's poems dissolve the world of ordinary conversation and etch out patterns that demand another kind of world, one in which Satan is satin but still Satan. And then it comes as something of a shock to find it's in fact our ordinary world still, which she has somehow gotten from a new angle. A real achievement." Keith Waldrop"

Martine Bellen

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