A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep

E.C. Belli's poems are magical. Her poems are intense lyrical distillates, capturing sorrow, or melancholy, or dreamy reverie through the alchemy of music that pulls at my heartstrings. Her poems are lullabies, lamentations, love songs, apostrophes to alter egos that praise the inclement weather of our interior moods. Whimsical, sultry and weighted with grief, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep is a collection of poems existing on a plane that is between waking and sleeping; it is a portrait of a beautiful and exquisitely perceptive subconscious. -- Cathy Park Hong, Judge, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry

When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered "Some people say it's a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it's a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love." Reading E.C. Belli's sensational A Sleep That is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli's remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, "little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me." The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what its made. In this collection, stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem "Hues" is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I'll be learning from for years. -- Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell