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Poetry Chapbook by John Belk, produced by Cathexis Northwest Press.
John Belk is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University where he directs the Writing Program. His poetry has appeared in Sugar House Review, Crab Orchard Review, Cathexis Northwest, Salt Hill, Kestrel, Worcester Review, Poetry South, San Pedro River Review, and Arkansas Review among others. His scholarship can be found in Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Forum, and edited anthologies. He currently lives in southern Utah among red rocks and stands of juniper.
Igneous rock-fire and stone. The juxtaposition of movement and stasis shape this lovely collection by John Belk. The fact that we are ‘hurtling through vastness in inconceivable rush’ is countered by ‘found’ rituals that slow down an unwieldy sense of mortality. These poems ask ‘How fragile are our carefully/curated selves?’ This chapbook deftly creates a strata of ‘selves’ formed by grief, hope, death, love, and tenuous survival instincts.
Individually, each poem uncovers layers such that reveal the ‘memory’ a rock carries of
its origins from within the earth, the stories behind scars on a woman’s arm, or a holiness in ‘colonies of lichen.’ As a collection, Belk’s poetry offers a quiet yet stunning affirmation of how language ‘made of the oldest words’ will outlast our own ‘weathering.’
Danielle Dubrasky, author of Ruin and Light
