Radioactive City is the latest book of poetry by the prominent contemporary American poet, Richard Robbins. The distinguished poet Linda Gregerson, selected Radioactive City as the winner of the 2009 Bellday Poetry Prize. About the winning entry, Professor Gregerson said, It is conceptual freshness, and a beautiful instinct for emergent shape, that makes this poetry radioactive. Robbins can spin a hitherto undiscovered cosmos out of a single, wayward proposition, but he never loses footing in the radiant, mortal, given world. Richest invention is tempered by submission to the textures of material and social and ethical life. Vision and insight both, in other words: what more can one ask of a book of poems?

Radioactive City

Literature & Fiction

Richard Robbins

Poetry

Bellday Books, Inc.

Success of the Seed Plants is the first book of poetry by award-winning American poet, Leslie Williams. The distinguished poet Lucia Perillo, selected Success of the Seed Plants as the winner of the 2010 Bellday Poetry Prize. About the winning entry, Ms. Perillo said, A reader never knows what is coming next in the poems of Success of the Seed Plants they move as one would cross a stream, by adroitly leaping from rock to rock. The mood here therefore feels risky, as the narrator gambles against falling. I found her mental agility exhilarating.

Success of the Seed Plants

Leslie Williams

WINNER OF THE 2011 BELLDAY POETRY PRIZE These poems possess a quiet urgency—an elegant, stark beauty. The speaker wonders “What minimum: can I say.” The line “radiates/its own idea of bareness.” The sentences are prisms conjugating light. But there is also an unsettling quality to this work that continually questions itself and resolutely insists on remaining open to possibility and fluctuation. I'm deeply impressed by the strikingly original combination of delicacy and rigor—the seemingly effortless way the focus shifts from outer landscapes to “the sky we have inside.” Elaine Equi I can think of no poet's first book in recent years that has given me as much pleasure as Rae Gouirand's Open Winter, and I can think of no other poet whose descriptive abilities are as acutely tuned to the gradations of atmosphere—cold, stars, qualities of air and light and celestial bodies. Gouirand breaks with common syntax and repunctuates the world in stops and starts as she reaches toward new ways to parse the complexities of love. Open Winter shows us how language breaks and fails, how poems repair and revive. Mark Wunderlich Rae Gouirand's poems glow with motion and stillness, the richness of consciousness, as they delicately enlarge the boundaries of comprehension and desire. The sense of scale—infinitesimal to vast—is capacious as mind itself. The most reticent stars can be seen only if you look to the side of where they shine. Open Winter uses this slant approach to access areas of perception and feeling that only can be reached obliquely. A complex innerness gleams through the cracks of the language, the white space between syntaxes: an interruption that sings. These fragmented, oscillating lyrics consider a terrain between nameable states, a site of incipience as well as boundary. “There is nothing not plural” Gouirand writes, and her lines implode with echoed words, a corrugated grammar that unfolds under our eyes, emergent as song or breath. “Ink kindles, heightens, takes its final place,” she notes, in lines that beautifully eulogize inscription. Open Winter offers a shimmering geometry of cognition in visionary poems that witness the erotic ligatures between self and world. It is a generative—and deeply generous—book.Alice Fulton

Open Winter

Rae Gouirand

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Books by Bellday Books, Inc.

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

Radioactive City

Success of the Seed Plants

Open Winter