A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep

Product Description Winner of the 2020 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, Belli hands the stage to a luminous constancy in this lyrical and incisive collection. Structured around a central poem, 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. 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. A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep cuts to the bone with its sensual turns and its linguistic ingenuity. This volume offers a tender companionship to readers reckoning with intimacy. From the Back Cover 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 PoetryWhen 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 About the Author E.C. Belli is the author of Objects of Hunger (SIU Press, 2019), winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Series First Book Award. She is the translator of I, Little Asylum by Emmanuelle Guattari (Semiotext(e), 2014) and The Nothing Bird: Selected Poems by Pierre Peuchmaurd (Oberlin College Press, 2013). The recipient of a 2010 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, her work in French has appeared in Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle and PO&SIE (France), among others.