Buried Treasure

Dan Bellm is a writer, editor, and translator. His first book of poetry, One Hand On the Wheel, launched the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press, and his second, Buried Treasure, (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1999), won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. He is also a widely published translator of poetry and fiction from Spanish. He has been awarded poetry residencies at Yaddo and Dorset Colony House, as well as an Artist’ s Fellowship in Literature from the California Arts Council. His most recent book of poetry is Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008), winner of the California Book Award, and he teaches in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. “This stunning book is fiercely alive, and awake to the self as both singular and inextricably part of the whole—to the body as one in a field of yearning and failing human forms. ‘Delle Avenue’ is—and I don’t say this lightly—a great poem of city life, of the confluence of memory and history and voice which city streets are. Dan Bellm’s genuine authority and his vulnerable, almost physical presence on the page lead us, somehow, to connection with what is larger, more ongoing, than any single person is; he sings the anxious and lovely story of his place and time.” –Mark Doty “Whether he is looking at a small town, a hip neighborhood or the inner city, Dan Bellm regards American life with honesty, pity, and acceptance. He invokes the spirits of the poet James Schuyler and the composer John Cage, and the blessing they provide him is that, like them, Bellm scorns nothing. He can make poetry out of the ordinary grief of his parents’ lives or the unlikely details of a shabby city street. He finds a connection between artistic ambition and the evolutionary stubbornness of quaking aspens. He has not forgotten his childhood, even as he struggles with being a parent. These poems range widely, giving us both the big picture of our time and place and the personal situation carrying on modestly within it. This poet’s gift—and I think it is a substantial one—is for heartbreaking accuracy.” –Mark Jarman More Information: Dan Bellm Websitehttps://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clpc_bks/1006/thumbnail.jp