Poetry. Dan Bellm's third book of poems takes as its starting point the Jewish practice of studying weekly portions of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, in an annual cycle. Working in the midrashic tradition--imaginatively explaining or expanding a Biblical text, often well beyond its literal meaning--the poems offer meditations on faith, doubt, yearning, family ties, love and loss, and the age-old roots of modern-day war. In PRACTICE, we see a poet of extraordinary range and formal versatility, whose sonnets, villanelles, prose poems, and lyric inventions engage both the imagination and the heart. These poems are at once accessible and complex, deeply personal and profoundly universal.

Author Hometown: San Francisco, CA USA



About the author: Dan Bellm lives in San Francisco. His first book of poetry, One Hand on the Wheel, launched the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press, and his second, Buried Treasure, won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. He is also a widely published translator of poetry and fiction from Spanish.