Without Woman or Body by Allison Field Bell

These unflinching poems communicate the physical, emotional and psychic toll of carving out a life as “this heavy thing they call woman”, a toll which dogs this speaker wherever she goes, from the Sonoran Desert (“spikes gone soft in starlight”) to an Israeli kibbutz (“the worst worry is animal”) to Barcelona (“ Here, you can/ speak. You can read signs, order a glass of wine. /Vino, por favor. You can ask for directions, tell/ men to fuck off.)”  Their honesty is searing and staggering.

–Jacqueline Osherow

From friendship to inebriation, from strings of lovers to lovers with strings, from the most florescent male guppy to the first tulip that breaks through the snow, Without Woman or Body is the branching of female desire. Winter is for dreaming, and come spring, these poems yearn themselves into buds, unfurling, green and hungry for the sun. Allison Field Bell is magnificent, and her poems will ravish you.

–Lily Hoàng

A poet’s heart caught and tangled in a woman’s body…Virginia Woolf, as she often does, gets it right. Allison Field Bell‘s remarkable chapbook is a lyric study of a woman and her body, though its title looks forward to a time when neither will be so important. These poems are entangled with the natural world, from the Negev’s date trees to backyard tulips, snow in Indiana to cottonwoods anywhere in the American west. What else but our landscapes are suitable for illuminating not only a woman’s body, but our embodiment. The wisis speaker has “legs as resilient as cacti/and you can plant them anywhere.” Field Bell has planted these vivid and astonishing poems in my heart and body, too.

–Connie Voisine