What Small Sound by Francesca Bell, Red Hen Press, May 2023
In her second collection, What Small Sound, Francesca Bell immerses readers in a world rife with beauty and violence, “green grass and suffering.” She explores adversity through both a personal lens (hearing loss, rape, suicide, a child’s devastating mental illness) and a communal one (America’s gun and loneliness epidemics, wildfire devastation, an arbitrary and capricious God). Yet, at the root of, and indeed throughout all calamity, love and grace abide, if only, at times, through the sheer power of Bell’s language.
Employing a loosely braided structure, the poet shares a speaker’s narrative from girlhood through coming of age, to motherhood, and menopause. As a woman of similar age and experiences, I felt commiserated with. In “Menopause, Insomnia, News,” Bell captures a menopausal moment with wry clarity:
“…and I turn in my bed, dripping
like a pig on a spit…”
And in “Late Mammogram,” I nodded ruefully at
“…the tech shoves
and smashes me into place…”
The short poem “Becoming” provides insight into the emotional heft and metaphorical alchemy of Bell’s work.
“Once, I was a whole person.
I agreed to be transformed,
through trauma into pieces.
I laid myself cheerfully down
before the apocalypse.
After, the doctor placed the baby
among my body’s wreckage.
I learned to call this love.”
And indeed, the speaker’s intensity, her love—for her children, for her own selfhood and body, her husband, friends, lovers, music, and nature—infuses every poem. This is a speaker who celebrates the world’s fullness all the while facing its violence and grief, and concludes that:
“Loss accrues, the geese can tell you.
It compounds. Like interest.
Oh, world, leave me slowly.
Let me dally over each diminishing return.”
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Francesca Bell is a poet and translator. Her debut collection, Bright Stain (Red Hen Press 2019), was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her work appears widely in literary journals, and she has received a Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle and an Honorable Mention in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. Bell grew up in Washington and Idaho and did not complete middle school, high school, or college. She lives with her family in Novato, CA.
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Reviewer Mary Beth Hines is the author of “Winter at a Summer House” (Kelsay, 2021). A Lightwood writer and reviewer, her work appears widely in literary journals. Her chapbook manuscript was a finalist in both Fool for Poetry’s and Comstock Review’s 2023 contests. Connect with her at Https://www.marybethhines.com
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