Someone Else’s Wedding Vows
Bianca Stone
Argos Books
The lament over the Death of the Book—the physical, battery-less variety—is ubiquitous. E-books and e-readers, iPads, Kindles and something called Nook are supposedly our dreaded enemies waging war against an “increasingly illiterate” American reader. Phooey. Many of the most exciting literary titles being published this year—by Sand Paper Press and Factory Hollow Press, for example—prove that old school bibliophilia is alive and flourishing with young publishers. Enter Argos Books’ first chapbook: Someone Else’s Wedding Vows by poet and artist Bianca Stone. In a little gray book with original artwork and a chic design by the publisher, you will find twenty or so reasons that I suspect readers won’t be abandoning print format anytime soon. Beautiful poetry demands to be held in the hand, drank at the eye, read aloud with the mouth. Reading poems is as bodily an experience, I’d argue, as digestion or respiration. Turns out the body’s just what Stone’s poems haunt so well, sentient and inanimate alike: “the moon puts powder on its pocked face,” “Everything slopes / towards the bedroom. / I move among your wheat”; “The nose of childhood is not the nose of now,” “I was staring out of my compound eye / with monochromatic vision.” Considerations of such tactile and spooky imagery aside, Stone is a poet to watch—already her work brisks with authority. How does so young a poet write phrases with such music and memorability, speak in a voice so hauntingly her own? Thanks to Argos Books, I’m betting Bianca Stone—like poetry & the printed page—is here to stay.
Adam Fitzgerald reads Bianca Stone's "The Letter":
Find all of Adam Fitzgerald's "Ten for Ten" posts here
