Soft Box

Foreword by Jane Cooper

Celia Bland‘s three collections of poetry (including Soft Box, from CavanKerry, 2004) were the subject of an essay by Jonathan Blunk in the summer 2019 issue ofThe Georgia Review. Cherokee Road Kill (Dr. Cicero, 2018) featured pen and ink drawings by Japanese artist Kyoko Miyabe.  The title poem received the 2015 Raynes Prize.  Her work is included inNative Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft and Conversation (Tupelo Press 2019).  Selected prints of the Madonna Comix, an image and poetry collaboration created with artist Dianne Kornberg, were exhibited at Lesley Heller Gallery in New York City, and published by William James Books with an introduction by Luc Sante. Bland is co-editor with Martha Collins of the essay collectionJane Cooper: A Radiance of Attention (U. of Michigan, 2019).  She wrote the catalogue essay for “In the Midst of Something Splendid: Recent Paintings by Colleen Randall” opening at the Hood Museum, Dartmouth College in January 2020.  She is the author of young adult biographies of the Native American leaders Pontiac, Osceola, and Peter MacDonald (Chelsea House Books). Originally from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Bland teaches poetry at Bard College, where she is associate director of the Bard College Institute for Writing & Thinking.

Misconceptions of Childhood

My father was a sidewise Jack, always in profile, a
hand on his rod.
His pack was a Destroyer, said my mother,
where he played ping-pong on the deck, two fingers flat
on his spade.
I saw his photo: a big-bellied dick in a tailor-made sailor
suit.
“Bye-Bye!” he waved, and out I sprang, strong enough
to shove all the drawers shut.

My teeth took root. White stalagmites, their stems sunk             inward
and rotted. Biting strawberries, they sheared unripe
heads from luscious tips.
The leaves caused a rash.

My mouth’s toes, St. Theresa, grind with your hips
when you close your eyes. Sex is sacred, you say.
Leaving me, to prove it.

This poet writes like a woman with a mission. Her collection resounds with an honesty that is at once brutal and determined. Soft Box speaks for itself and does not speak softly. Celia Bland writes like a woman possessed and the result is bewitching.
— Foreword Magazine 2005

This account of coming of age, marrying, giving birth is different from any other that I have read: It is violently original. Sometimes raw and tough, sometimes startling in their beauty and sense of necessity, these poems, which read like swift, migratory chapters, are wildly gifted.
— Jean Valentine

Celia Bland makes of her poems a new world, newly opened to us. She strikes us where we live, in poems to which nothing human is alien: eternal delight, mental action, moral integrity. Love of true speech, the minded boy, the embodied memory drives her forward to discover the whole person undenied. She is doing the work our language needs.
— Marie Ponsot

She possesses a thrilling sense of the erotics of everyday things; her deft particulars fetch us. She resists the pallid entitlements of relationship stuff, and keeps her lyrics rueful reminders that each person, despite kinfolk and connections, is radically alone in the world of desire and shortcoming. Sometimes gloriously alone, as she feels her way through her own complexities: vigilant, detailed, intellectually joyous.
— Robert Kelly

April 2004
69 pp
Trade paper – 6 X 9.5
$14
978-0-9707186-9-3