Spot in the Dark is a collection of poetry exploring the nuances of human relationships. From new love to extramarital affairs to dating to solitude, the book's four sections read as a journey by a series of narrators who wrestle through the beginning and middle stages of love, the complications of an affair, and the challenges of single life, and finally come to focus on the external world: the beauty and starkness of a winter landscape, the ebullience of spring, the breathtaking loveliness of a sunset. The book's are moves from examining the human wish and will to connect to another to presenting the self as part of a larger, richer, and more complicated set of external relationships. Written predominantly in free verse, these sometimes meditative, sometimes cynical, sometimes playful poems sift through the difficulties and pleasures of living in the world.

SPOT IN THE DARK (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

Literature & Fiction

GYLYS, BETH

Poetry

Ohio State University Press

Spot in the Dark is a collection of poetry exploring the nuances of human relationships. From new love to extramarital affairs to dating to solitude, the book's four sections read as a journey by a series of narrators who wrestle through the beginning and middle stages of love, the complications of an affair, and the challenges of single life, and finally come to focus on the external world: the beauty and starkness of a winter landscape, the ebullience of spring, the breathtaking loveliness of a sunset. The book's arc moves from examining the human wish and will to connect to another to presenting the self as part of a larger, richer, and more complicated set of external relationships. Written predominantly in free verse, these sometimes meditative, sometimes cynical, sometimes playful poems sift through the difficulties and pleasures of living in the world.

Dramas & Plays

Balloon Heart

Wind Pubns

Body Braille by Beth Gylys is a collection that explores the failures and complications of existing in the world as a sentient being. Broken into five sections, four of the first five focus around a particular sense: touch, taste, vision/sight, and hearing. The book's final section--comprised of a crown of elegiac sonnets--follows a man after he loses his wife as he fights through the initial stages of grief. The collection--bookended by poems of intimacy and death--moves through the senses, reimagining the possibilities and failures of the body, and ending in death/life after excruciating loss. The collection is one undergirded by loss but also threaded through with resilience, a resilience that expresses itself as humor, as defiance, as longing, and as survival. Ultimately, the collection attempts to gain purchase on our humanity through its exploration of sensual and bodily experience.

Body Braille

Iris Press

This unique collection/anthology uncannily puts its finger on the pulse of our pandemic concerns of loneliness and isolation and our longing for community and conversation. Despite the distinctive voices of the three women, these poems weave into a whole, or perhaps a better metaphor is a patchwork quilt, sewn by many hands, while colored threads of gossip and conversation, observation and confession, tales of love and violence, are pulled through with a sharp, squinting needle. While the paths of these three women, three friends, travel to new places, there are common elements of Southern gothic, humor, observations on aging and love, longing and sense of place, and the poems speak to each other as well as to the reader. The poets have shared poems over a period of time, inspiring and riffing off one another, editing one another's work, so that there is something both ancient and choral and contemporary and subversively collaborative about this project, especially in a literary scene obsessed with self-promotion, exposure, and individual celebrity. 
—A. E. Stallings\nPart of how we remember poets is how poets remember each other. Wordsworth and Coleridge, Bishop and Lowell, Levertov and Duncan and Rich: these friendships survive in letters and poems that reveal much about how these poets influenced each other’s work. But rarely do we have a single book written, edited, and imagined collaboratively by three poet-friends who reflect upon many of the same concerns and, in doing so, inspire in each other new avenues of thought. Here are poems about aging parents and ex-lovers, memory and belief, partnership, ambition, art and marriage. These poems together become a profound conversation that evolves between friends. It’s a generous, empathetic, and loving collection that is as much an ode to the life-giving powers of friendship as of poetry itself. 
—Paisley Rekdall\nThese harmonically blended voices project a feminine perspective from spaces made “undomestic” by loss, violence, and disaster. Yet, in these poems you will also find rich and beautiful attention to the world—Narcissus blooms, abdomen scars, alighting birds, the smoke of cigars, the cars of heroic strangers—as well as to lovers, friends, and family made strange via the labyrinth of accumulated memory. Indeed, the weight of time gives these poems heft. Their speakers traverse the traumatic and quotidian with insight that is only drawn from experience, transformed into poetry through the authors’ prismatic imagination. Reading this collection, one begins to believe that the mundane can become new again: “as if the world / is some ancient coin / and you’re scraping / off the caked-on mud / to discover the luster.” 
—Danielle Deulen

The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouth Jars

Carlisi, Cathy

Wheelock, Jennifer

Kelsay Books

Poetry. Beth Gylys is a poet that people will remember and BODIES THAT HUM is going to be an auspicious debut collection. Her subject is an ordinary one, love and its discontents, but her music is extraordinary with the toughness of Carolyn Kizer and Dorothy Parker mixed into a loneliness that feels -- it sounds very different! -- like Emily Dickinson. Hers is an improvisatory, jazzy art that takes villanelles and sestinas back to the public urgency -- Dave Smith. BODIES THAT HUM is the winner of the 1997 Gerald Cable Book Award.

BODIES THAT HUM

Silverfish Review Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GYLYS, BETH. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by GYLYS, BETH

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by GYLYS, BETH. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

SPOT IN THE DARK (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

SPOT IN THE DARK (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

SPOT IN THE DARK (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

Balloon Heart

Body Braille

The Conversation Turns to Wide-Mouth Jars

BODIES THAT HUM