Gut Renovations

A memoir in verse, Vincent Bell's Gut Renovations is a testament to the strength of someone who, against all odds, not only survived his painful past but prevailed. "No one is without history," Bell writes, near the end of the collection, "we just may be blind to it." Bell's poems plumb personal experiences as they provide vivid vignettes (in tight, clipped verse) of the various jobs, diversions, and vices he used to avoid the trauma of his early life. With the poetic heart of Frank O'Hara and the simple style of Ernest Hemingway, Vincent Bell has written a powerful, compelling account of a childhood shaped by secrets, sexual abuse, and silence. Gut Renovations is a stunning debut.

-Jennifer Franklin, author of No Small Gift (Four Way Books)

As the title of Vincent Bell's new book Gut Renovations implies, there is serious work going on here - entire rooms - a life - stripped to the studs and rebuilt, by memory, by poetry. No, not rebuilt, for the old bones show through, the basic floor plan remains the same, but reanimated. It's a testament to Mr. Bell's superb craftsmanship and unfailing recall of detail that, for example, we see with our own eyes, but more deeply, the subtle menace of even the most mundane objects. Reader, these are achingly moving odes to loss and recovery. They will gut you, and then, little by little amaze you with their reconstructed beauty.

-Daniel Lawless, editor of Plume

At the heart of this startling debut is the negotiation between radical self-disclosure and the cool formality of human intercourse; a desire to unravel. These poems read like elegies but also fables, joining narratives of ritual with the epiphanies of the everyday, insights which so often only arrive in retrospective glances or waking dreams. Bell's ability to dig deep - and to keep drilling - provides exactly these gifts of reclamation. Gut Renovations is a discovery.

-Chris Campanioni, author of A and B and Also Nothing, the Internet is for real, and Death of Art; editor of PANK and publisher of PANK Books