Overview
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello's stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, ""something other and unknown."" These poems explore the author's home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observe nature's seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. The vivid and engaging poetry touches upon history, inheritance, dry rivers, mountains, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifer forests succumbing to climate change or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future. In doing so, Bello creates a connection between generations that underscores our most critical tool for survival: imagination. Ultimately a dedication of resilience, Refugia creates a terrain of the imagination that is, like ecological terrain, grounded in image and yet many-layered and unresolved. This poetry is a listening that writes us back into an ecological language of place that is crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
Full Product Details
Author: Kyce Bello
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
Imprint: University of Nevada Press
Dimensions:
Width: 13.70cm
, Height: 1.00cm
, Length: 21.00cm
Weight: 0.155kg
ISBN: 9781948908344
ISBN 10: 1948908344
Pages: 104
Publication Date: 04 September 2019
Audience:
General/trade
,
General
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: In Print
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Reviews
Kyce Bello elegantly braids together a focus on daily concerns-with an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly motherhood-with environmental concerns, as she grapples with the gifts and burdens of living in the Anthropocene... Bello's ability to hold joy and despair in the heart at once is remarkable; her concern for drought, for lost conifers, for the world her children will inhabit and inherit shines in these poems. - Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest Kyce Bello's haunting Refugia is both homage and lament for the Earth we share. Kinder than Robinson Jeffers, Bello extends her sympathy also to the transience of human existence wherein we are all, ultimately, refugees. The equanimity of Bello's vision is direly needed in the ongoing environmental crises of our world. I'm thankful to find a poet in the 21st century with such compassion. - Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at UNLV
"Kyce Bello elegantly braids together a focus on daily concerns—with an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly motherhood—with environmental concerns, as she grapples with the gifts and burdens of living in the Anthropocene… Bello's ability to hold joy and despair in the heart at once is remarkable; her concern for drought, for lost conifers, for the world her children will inhabit and inherit shines in these poems."" - Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest ""Kyce Bello's haunting Refugia is both homage and lament for the Earth we share. Kinder than Robinson Jeffers, Bello extends her sympathy also to the transience of human existence wherein we are all, ultimately, refugees. The equanimity of Bello's vision is direly needed in the ongoing environmental crises of our world. I'm thankful to find a poet in the 21st century with such compassion."" - Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at UNLV"
In Bello's tender debut, mothers and children tend to a resilient Earth, even as anxiety about climate change overwhelms the landscape.-- Publishers Weekly Refugia captures the losses, the quiet rage, and the constant, near-overwhelming wonder of life on this very particular planet in this very particular moment, somehow also managing to make amends with the arriving of our almost certainly unfamiliar future.-- World Literature Today Quietly political... Loving, unsparing visions of Bello's native and family environments make Refugia both a lament and a song of praise. The poems are arranged in a direct way and are rife with detail, their lines both visceral and accessible.-- Foreword Reviews
Author Information
Kyce Bello's poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, About Place Journal, Anomaly Literary Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Taos Journal of Poetry, and Sonora Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
