Counting by Dan Bellm

Description

Counting

by Dan Bellm

$15.99, paper

979-8-88838-180-9

2023

In the title poem of Dan Bellm’s Counting, a circle of rabbis in Talmudic times confess to each other ruefully, “I have never in my life prayed with intention.…” “I have been counting chickens….” “I have been counting the layers of stone in the wall….” These poems, on a seeking-and-straying spiritual quest of their own, count and recount the layers of days in a life, ranging widely from yearning, elegy and political outrage to passion, devotion, and gratitude.

Dan Bellm lives in Berkeley, California. He is the author of four books of poems: One Hand on the Wheel (Roundhouse Press, 1999), which launched the California Poetry Series; Buried Treasure (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999), winner of the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America and the CSU Poetry Center Prize; Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008), winner of a 2009 California Book Award; and Deep Well (Lavender Ink, 2017). His translations from Spanish and French include Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo (Flower Song Press, 2023); Speaking in Song, by Pura López Colomé (Shearsman Books, 2017), and The Song of the Dead, by Pierre Reverdy (Black Square Editions, 2016), completed with the support of an Artist’s Fellowship in Translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has taught literary translation and poetry in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles, at Mills College, and at New York University, and he serves as an interpreter for immigrants and asylum seekers with Centro Legal de la Raza, Oakland, California. www.danbellm.com.