University of Nevada Press, 2019 eISBN: 978-1-948908-33-7 | Paper: 978-1-948908-34-4 Library of Congress Classification PS3602.E4584 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Kyce Bello’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, About Place Journal, Anomaly Literary Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Taos Journal of Poetry, and Sonora Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
REVIEWS
Kyce Bello elegantly braids together a focus on daily concerns—with an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly motherhood—with environmental concerns, as she grapples with the gifts and burdens of living in the Anthropocene… Bello’s ability to hold joy and despair in the heart at once is remarkable; her concern for drought, for lost conifers, for the world her children will inhabit and inherit shines in these poems.
— Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest
Kyce Bello's haunting Refugia is both homage and lament for the Earth we share. Kinder than Robinson Jeffers, Bello extends her sympathy also to the transience of human existence wherein we are all, ultimately, refugees. The equanimity of Bello's vision is direly needed in the ongoing environmental crises of our world. I'm thankful to find a poet in the 21st century with such compassion.
— Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at UNLV
“Strange how hard it is to speak to the future, to leave a/ paper trail.” But this is what Kyce Bello’s Refugia does. These are poems of blooming and burning, poems of growth and decay, poems that still see beauty in a broken world—“like seams of gold/ mending a cracked kintsugi, / the bowl rendered precious/ by its breaking.” Bello is a poet to watch, and Refugia is a book we need in this moment.
— Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
The poems of Refugia confer upon its readers the injunction to join with inquiry time and time again, as in the lines: “If we perish — I meant to say persist — / do we arise and turn / with the wind?” and its readers must. Bello’s poetics do not coddle. There’s no time for such. What is left of the world we are given. What Refugia makes of it we must pass on to our children, and survive all else to survive for.
— Joan Naviyuk Kane, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Bunting Fellow
Quietly political... Loving, unsparing visions of Bello’s native and family environments make Refugia both a lament and a song of praise. The poems are arranged in a direct way and are rife with detail, their lines both visceral and accessible.
— Foreword Reviews
In Bello’s tender debut, mothers and children tend to a resilient Earth, even as anxiety about climate change overwhelms the landscape.
— Publishers Weekly
Refugia captures the losses, the quiet rage, and the constant, near-overwhelming wonder of life on this very particular planet in this very particular moment, somehow also managing to make amends with the arriving of our almost certainly unfamiliar future.
— World Literature Today
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Part One:
Refugia (1)
Dear Future Child
The Ashram at Leigh Mill Road
Guide to Flowering Plants
The Trouble with Belief
Refugia (2)
The Tree Coroners
Message in a Bottle from the Sea of Cortez
Grail Story
Phrases in the Original Unspoken
Brief Guide to Epigenetic Memory with Burning Bosque
Refugia (3)
Paper Trail
Equinox
Grass Widow
In the Air Before Easer
Part Two:
Portrait of the Homemaker at Eighteen
I Wear Long Skirts for My Own Unwary Pleasure,
Refugia (4)
Notes to Future Botanists in Search of Conifers
The Speaker Reconciles with Spring
For the Record
Solar Pinholes
Gazing on the Mid-Morning in an Expression of Solidarity
Refugia (5)
Crossing Elwood Pass
The Washerwoman Maps Her Body Before Death
The Carp Pond
Dowsing
Refugia (6)
Field Notes
Part Three:
Rinconada
Summer Ends With Ringing
Landscape with River Restored to its Historic Channel After 100 Years
Refugia (7)
Fall Reckoning
When We Gathered to Stock up On Light
Cusp with Various Visitations
Our Names Unfurl Across Winter
Refugia (8)
Further Phrases in the Original Unspoken
Omega
Archipelago of Ancestral Bodies and Unnamed Landmarks of the Present
Refugia (9)
Waveform
Origin of the Apple
Right of First Refugium
Acknowledgements
Notes
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Nevada Press, 2019 eISBN: 978-1-948908-33-7 Paper: 978-1-948908-34-4
Winner of the 2020 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards
Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize
Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change. Kyce Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, “something other and unknown, growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with personal cycles of renewal and loss. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place crucial to our survival in this time of environmental crisis.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Kyce Bello’s poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Boston Review, About Place Journal, Anomaly Literary Journal, The Raven Chronicles, Taos Journal of Poetry, and Sonora Review. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
REVIEWS
Kyce Bello elegantly braids together a focus on daily concerns—with an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly motherhood—with environmental concerns, as she grapples with the gifts and burdens of living in the Anthropocene… Bello’s ability to hold joy and despair in the heart at once is remarkable; her concern for drought, for lost conifers, for the world her children will inhabit and inherit shines in these poems.
— Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest
Kyce Bello's haunting Refugia is both homage and lament for the Earth we share. Kinder than Robinson Jeffers, Bello extends her sympathy also to the transience of human existence wherein we are all, ultimately, refugees. The equanimity of Bello's vision is direly needed in the ongoing environmental crises of our world. I'm thankful to find a poet in the 21st century with such compassion.
— Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at UNLV
“Strange how hard it is to speak to the future, to leave a/ paper trail.” But this is what Kyce Bello’s Refugia does. These are poems of blooming and burning, poems of growth and decay, poems that still see beauty in a broken world—“like seams of gold/ mending a cracked kintsugi, / the bowl rendered precious/ by its breaking.” Bello is a poet to watch, and Refugia is a book we need in this moment.
— Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
The poems of Refugia confer upon its readers the injunction to join with inquiry time and time again, as in the lines: “If we perish — I meant to say persist — / do we arise and turn / with the wind?” and its readers must. Bello’s poetics do not coddle. There’s no time for such. What is left of the world we are given. What Refugia makes of it we must pass on to our children, and survive all else to survive for.
— Joan Naviyuk Kane, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Bunting Fellow
Quietly political... Loving, unsparing visions of Bello’s native and family environments make Refugia both a lament and a song of praise. The poems are arranged in a direct way and are rife with detail, their lines both visceral and accessible.
— Foreword Reviews
In Bello’s tender debut, mothers and children tend to a resilient Earth, even as anxiety about climate change overwhelms the landscape.
— Publishers Weekly
Refugia captures the losses, the quiet rage, and the constant, near-overwhelming wonder of life on this very particular planet in this very particular moment, somehow also managing to make amends with the arriving of our almost certainly unfamiliar future.
— World Literature Today
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents
Part One:
Refugia (1)
Dear Future Child
The Ashram at Leigh Mill Road
Guide to Flowering Plants
The Trouble with Belief
Refugia (2)
The Tree Coroners
Message in a Bottle from the Sea of Cortez
Grail Story
Phrases in the Original Unspoken
Brief Guide to Epigenetic Memory with Burning Bosque
Refugia (3)
Paper Trail
Equinox
Grass Widow
In the Air Before Easer
Part Two:
Portrait of the Homemaker at Eighteen
I Wear Long Skirts for My Own Unwary Pleasure,
Refugia (4)
Notes to Future Botanists in Search of Conifers
The Speaker Reconciles with Spring
For the Record
Solar Pinholes
Gazing on the Mid-Morning in an Expression of Solidarity
Refugia (5)
Crossing Elwood Pass
The Washerwoman Maps Her Body Before Death
The Carp Pond
Dowsing
Refugia (6)
Field Notes
Part Three:
Rinconada
Summer Ends With Ringing
Landscape with River Restored to its Historic Channel After 100 Years
Refugia (7)
Fall Reckoning
When We Gathered to Stock up On Light
Cusp with Various Visitations
Our Names Unfurl Across Winter
Refugia (8)
Further Phrases in the Original Unspoken
Omega
Archipelago of Ancestral Bodies and Unnamed Landmarks of the Present
Refugia (9)
Waveform
Origin of the Apple
Right of First Refugium
Acknowledgements
Notes
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE