Someone Else's Wedding Vows

Bianca Stone's poems are powerful, moving, and original. There is an amazing image center in her brain! Her brain (psyche, heart) can wrestle the matter of life to the ground (a pleasure for matter), and shapechange with it, and it does not give up its ghost but reveals, in joy and sorrow, its spirit. Stone's poems are highly charged, lively, and interesting. They are fiercely antisentimental, and emotionally generous. They have a distinctive underlying grieving compassion. I see in her work the natural weirdness and leaping of our minds. But wilder! It's as if she can take her mind out of gear, out of its prosaic limitations, and overhear, and sing, the strange true thoughts and feelings we have when we're at our most genuine and unprotected. In her poems we're in the presence of a naked human voice, not concealing itself--or over-reaching to expose itself--which dives as deep as voices go. --Sharon Olds, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Stag's Leap Let's say hypersensitivity ranks high up among poetry's necessary attributes. Let's say that to ride the back of a parable and make it past the bell rates further fervent notice, and let's say we want to pay attention to a poet who says we will perceive our own pain in others/and we will know if we are capable of loving them. Open the book, read this poem: 'Reading a Science Article on the Airplane to JFK, ' and then I'm confident you'll want to spend a lot of time with Bianca Stone's astonishing debut book. --Dara Wier, author of Remnants of Hannah I read the work of our most brilliant young poets to be reminded that it is still possible, despite everything, for our abused and decimated language to ring out the difficult truths of full-on awareness. The best of them, like Bianca Stone, do not settle for mere cleverness. They know it is not enough to be brilliant, that it is essential in poetry not merely to report the miseries and blessings, but to transform them. When she