"Belle Ling writes with a clean line, a sharp eye, and a heart attuned to the nuances of delight and grief. Nebulous Vertigo is a stunning début collection. Poems such as “This Heart Eats,” “What are you Really,” “To Return,” “Bagpipes, St. Patrick’s Day,” “One Intimate Morning,” and the title poem, release their depths slowly, surely, and powerfully."
— Kevin Hart, Duke University
"In Nebulous Vertigo, Belle Ling dances across the page with a highly original voice, chasing an ‘I’ that flees from itself and ‘these / bright sorrows under the sun’. The visceral pleasures of the present fall into our hands as Ling encounters objects—rain, soybeans, tangerines, phones, tea, mirrors, tofu—in pursuit of her evanescent self. Weaving together poems, visual artworks, and ideographs, Ling overleaps the grids and borders of cultures and genres with delicious ease, taking us with her in astonishing poems: “Breathe, / be ricocheted, be wings."
— Judith Bishop, author of Circadia
"An inventive and feeling mind flowers everywhere on these pages, and for me the banal anxieties of our modern world seem blotted out by a delightful new energy."
— Henri Cole, author of Orphic Paris and Gravity and Center: Selected Sonnets, 1994-2022
“In a year when the frenetic ambitions of generative artificial intelligence and its effects on our sense of truth, capacity for attention, and creativity have felt increasingly toxic to poetry, I’ve sought my antidote in books that follow the tracks of human feeling in slow, perceptive time. Hong Kong poet Belle Ling’s début collection, Nebulous Vertigo (Tupelo Press) reverberates with the tangible presence of the sensuous world. Several poems recall a writing teacher who mocked her use of colloquial words and corrected them to the standard forms. Now artificial intelligence revises us as if it knew best.”
— Australian Book Review, "Books of the Year 2025"