Encircle Press

24 pgs/$12.95

I staggered out of the theater after Waiting for Godot.
Jeez, I griped to Peter, That’s it? We’re all just wind and gristle?
Yep, he said after a minute, and I knew he was trying to remember
whether he’d stuck the parking ticket in his wallet or pocket.

I love it when a poet tells you what a poetry collection is all about in the first poem. In these four lines from the opening poem, ‘Monkey Spinning a Prayer Wheel’, Lisa Bellamy lays out a framework of what she’s concerning herself with in this chapbook called Nectar. The senselessness and mundanity of everything makes the protagonist call for her mother like a little girl:

 in my memory of chipping my tooth on the granite rock in our backyard,
and me wailing as my mother ran from her chaise lounge
where she’d been sunbathing and reading Leon Uris, her freckled arms
and the smell of her suntan oil—where is she? Where is she?

That is a powerful, if disconcerting, start to a book of poetry. Continue reading →