Martine Bellen is a poet of refreshing complexity. Her unpredictable disjunctions and conjunctions and her baroque mix of vivid images and meticulous abstractions make one uncertain whether these poems (in verse composed of prose segments) are precise narrations of the contingent or of dreams or of the former masquerading as the latter. They are full of surprises.
—Jackson Mac Low
…A wonderful rich music.
—Rosmarie Waldrop
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
Bellen’s gradual accretive methods and early invocations of Sappho and Freud should remind more than a few readers of H.D.; the foremother of lyric poetry sponsor’s Bellen’s melancholy victory…
—Publishers Weekly
Quirky, electric poems, spare and challenging.
—Peter Matthiessen
Martine Bellen’s poems dissolve the world of ordinary conversation and etch out patterns that demand another kind of world, one in which Satan is satin—but still Satan. And then it comes as something of a shock to find it’s in fact our ordinary world still, which she has somehow gotten from a new angle. A real achievement.
—Keith Waldrop
Martine Bellen (martinebellen.com). Martine Bellen is the author of nine collections of poetry including GHOSTS! (Spuyten Duyvil); The Vulnerability of Order (Copper Canyon Press); Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems (Sun & Moon), which won the National Poetry Series Award; and the novella 2X2 (BlazeVOX [BOOKS]). 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.
