HOPE WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS

//HOPE wasn’t always like this—stuck to the hollows of my chest, my ribs, distinct as fish gills. She taught me how to swim, roping her fragile arms around my neck and squealing as I dove into the wide blue sea. But now, she emerges like night with its thick white tablecloth, where I eat before the pang strikes, the ache that calls forth the white room whose door I can’t seem to shut.—Now I wade into the water, allow the water to rise over the hills of my body, my breasts, finally breathing, finally, underwater—//

ABOUT THE POET

Ariana D. Den Bleyker is a Pittsburgh native currently residing in Upstate New York, a wife, mother of two, a writer and an editor. When she’s not editing or writing, she’s spending time with her family and every once in a while sleeps. She is the author of several poetry chapbooks and collections, a novelette, a novella and an experimental memoir. 

ABOUT THE COVER

"Floating on Aubergine" is a custom gouache painting by Nicci Mechler. More work on IG: @wickedlittleheart.

PRAISE

Ariana D. Den Bleyker masterfully gives Emily Dickinson’s ‘thing with feathers that perches in the soul’ – Hope – a second life as a ‘lovely, strange and cold’ lover who wants to be tongue kissed and cut open. The reader will know this familiar lover even in the dark, her body made of barbed wire and dandelions, her ‘throat … filled with God.’ This lush and haunting chapbook-length prose poem is a love letter to the self, to what longings inhabit the body. There’s a sense that no matter how rough the world has become, Hope is there, her ‘sweet slips of song cutting the first gray hints of light.’ This is not to say Hope doesn’t cause chaos, roughly unlocking the body and sticking her beak between ribs. But she is a very ‘real red thing,’ living in each of our bodies. This poem is a true testament to our resilience.” ~ Nicole Rollender, author ofBone of My Bone and Little Deaths

Strangest Sea is more than strange, it is brave. Ariana D. Den Bleyker’s voice “leans in” and divides the self into halves, making the reader as rapacious and hungry as she is in the search to know hope on a deeper level. Her intense clarity of thought and highly acute degree of sensory awareness coupled with her rich and vivid imagery makes it clear even discomfort has a place in hope’s fickle hands. Whether human, bird, or fish, above all — female, Den Bleyker communes with hope on different levels. Each movement of the poem is self-referential, and, taken as a whole, a kind of meta-narrative that is incredibly smart. We are just lucky to witness such courageous vulnerability, such stunning use of the metaphor, all of which serves as the “beautiful architecture” for each poetic movement. ~ Katherine MacCue, author of No Timid Electra

OTHER BOOKS

The Peace of Wild Things (Porkbelly Press, 2015)
Dark Water (Number 13 Press, 2015)
Wayward Line (RAWArT Press, 2015)
Beautiful Wreckage (Flutter Press, 2015)
Hatched from Bone (Flutter Press, 2014)
Finger, Knuckle, Palm (LucidPlay Publishing, 2014)
Prosthesis (Lummox Press, 2014)