Description
Poetry. "Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging."—Peter Matthiessen
"WABAC MACHINE begins innocently enough with the thought that a cat has no real name and proceeds through inexorable dream/dervish/fairy tale logic to a place (the wild?) where nouns dissolve. This is a world of radical flux where self is barely even a construction. Let's call it post-human. There is nothing academic about it. Things loom up and are always something else. Here it makes perfect sense for one 'me' to say, 'I sell temporary kitties in the form of reconstituted sponges.'"—Rae Armantrout
"Martine Bellen invokes a new Muse, a new daughter of Mnemosyne, in WABAC MACHINE. In these poems, Time itself is the traveler-visiting epic, visiting nightmare, mischief and the Land of Heart's Desire. To Bellen, Time is a creature alive for an instant, and the instant reaches very far indeed, in every direction, even so far as the laughter of the gods."—Donald Revell
"Martine Bellen's psychological and linguistic adventures in poetry are unlike anyone else's. Celebrating the instabilities of our experience, her poems maneuver kaleidoscopically between ordinary life and myth or fairy tale, vital human concerns such as identity and dreamlike atmospheres where nothing stays as it appears for long. Her 'host of unlikely divinities' display a reality that is never ordinary, always evocative."—Charles North
Author Bio
Martine Bellen (martinebellen.com). Martine Bellen is the author of nine collections of poetry including GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil, 2011); THE VULNERABILITY OF ORDER (Copper Canyon Press, 2001); TALES OF MURASAKI AND OTHER POEMS (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and the novella 2X2 (BlazeVOX books, 2010). Her bilingual collection, Musée Magie, has been published in Germany by Verlag Waldgut (translator, Hans Jürgen Balmes). She has written the libretto for Ovidiana, an opera based on Ovid's Metamorphoses (composer, Matthew Greenbaum), which was performed in New York City and Philadelphia. She collaborated with David Rosenboom on Ah! Opera No-Opera, a collective work, co- composed and performed by creators from around the globe. Its world premiere was at Redcat in L.A (for more information, visit www.ah-opera.org). She has co-written, with Zhang Er, the libretto of Moon In The Mirror: A Monodrama—composer, Stephen Dembski—based on the Chinese legend of Chang E. She has been a recipient of the Queens Art Fund, New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Academy of Poets Award, and has received a residency from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Bellagio Center. Bellen is a contributing editor of the literary journal Conjunctions.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA