From the Belly

Poetry. In FROM THE BELLY, Virginia Bell opens the doors to a gallery of poetic meditations—on the tenderness of childhood and motherhood, the primal pleasures of food and sex, and the joyful aches of family and memory. The poems are by turns ekphrastic and self-consciously confessional, taking inspiration from the art of everyday things.

"Virginia Bell's FROM THE BELLY is pure pleasure and expertise. Poetry about all home matters secret, scary, and sweet. The body and its generations, our food and art. Poems both comfortable and ominous folded in fine linen but spotted with blood. The book, like a series of intimate paintings and photographs, is perfectly stilled. Bell is never hurried, and the reader is aware throughout of her technical skill, love, common sense, vision and magnificence."—Chris Green

"Like a painter who rejoices in the wrestle between abstraction and representation, Virginia Bell's poems respect and illuminate their earthly triggers while transforming this world through an impressive craft and compression."—Alice George