This Amazing Cage of Light: New and Selected Poems

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

…A wonderful rich music.
—Rosmarie Waldrop

Martine Bellen’s psychological and linguistic adventures in poetry are unlike anyone else’s. Celebrating the instabilities of our experience, her poems maneuver kaleidoscopically between ordinary life and myth or fairy tale, vital human concerns such as identity and dreamlike atmospheres where nothing stays as it appears for long. Her ‘host of unlikely divinities’ display a reality that is never ordinary, always evocative.
—Charles North

Bellen’s gradual accretive methods and early invocations of Sappho and Freud should remind more than a few readers of H.D.; the foremother of lyric poetry sponsor’s Bellen’s melancholy victory…
—Publishers Weekly

Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging.
—Peter Matthiessen

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