preorder my book!
I am thrilled to share that my book, diluvium // a bluejay, is now available for preorder with free shipping!
Here are some words on the book from three amazing poets:
In this commanding collection, Isabel Bezerra Balée maps the territories of ecological catastrophe and immense personal loss. Each line is a spiraling eye, a witness of both fury and grief, the resounding notes of flood-song. With precision and reverence, Balée forges language from the ruins, fusing wondrous images with the tender voice of contemplation. Here is a sacred geography, with flowers laid down for what has been lost and what remains. - Desiree Bailey
What's the difference between a vein and a river? Or between grieving and being pulled into the gulf? Does it matter when you're gasping for air, the weight of a disintegrating world pressing into your heart? Through a haze of blood, pollen, and brackish tears, Isabel Bezerra Balée moves us with her as she navigates the waters of memory to where myth meets the searing light of lived experience as a daughter in a screaming earth drowning in fire. Part flood narrative, part devastating account of maternal loss, all against capitalism, diluvium // a bluejay pierced through the meridians of my body, and I'm not sure that I ever want it to leave. - Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta
We enter Isabel Bezerra Balée's beautiful and unsparing diluvium // a bluejay over the "sill of scandalized language." With fierce concision, imagistic strength, and powerful grief work, diluvium // a bluejay both reflects and renovates Celan and Bachmann. The book is language as geology, flooding through New Orleans streets, vanished marshlands, and a quotidian world shattered by technology and capital. Geology is in turn written on the mother's body, the hours of her loss. In this extraordinary work, Balée brings the reader with her to the crucible, to language as a site of absence and abandon. - Lauren Levin
I am exceedingly grateful to the folks at Dogpark Collective: to Kate Robinson-Beckwith & the design team for developing the look and feel that I’m so happy with, and to Eric Sneathen for helping me to excavate old work & expand the scope of this manuscript that came together, ever so slowly, over a period of about 4 years. It’s surreal to be letting go of this project. I can’t believe it.