Title: Where Bells Begin Author: Tessa Micaela ISBN: 9780999418666 Publisher: Rescue Press Published: 2019 Binding: Paperback Language: English Condition Note: New from the publisher Publisher Description: Poetry. Declaration provides solace of structure for o, the book's enigmatic but adamant speaker who navigates the seams of reality and dream in Tessa Micaela's WHERE BELLS BEGIN. In a landscape where the mist rises from the chemicals bubbling on the surface, meaning emerges from conditions and point of view. Tense in its strain against the impossibility of building a world from props or propositions alone, this collection enriches a sterile reality with mystic longing. o embodies the lyric gesture, at once feral and epiphanic, while clinging to tactility and communityâ moving towards a we. These poems deny chronology, completion, or sure footing; the reader must continually recalibrate their understanding of o's circumstances even as o insists on o's own vulnerability, fear, invisibility, and becoming-ness. The conviction to observe, record, and deconstruct the abstractions of an over-policed, over-graphed world is not only o's ars-poetica, but an ethical imperative for readers seeking to re-sensitize the soul. Lyrical yet economic, conceptual without fatigue, Tessa Micaela's WHERE BELLS BEGIN evokes familiar intimacies rendered anew by o, an almost-protagonist who drifts about a city, landscapes, fragments. Modernist traces breathe through Micaela's lines: the social bestiary of Kafka, the patience of Lispector. Comparisons like these risk pushing WHERE BELLS BEGIN afield from its particular and immediate proximity to this world though; a gap of an l, m, n stands between Josef K and o. In the face of silent authority, o persists, waits, believes. o's belief, like ours, in arrival or completion, does not betray the pleasure of waiting. And what is the weight of the lyric if not a learning to stay in waiting? Perhapsâ or, perhaps, we aren't meant to imagine ourselves so large. Schlegel once wrote of Kant's failure to include the almost in his categories. WHERE BELLS BEGIN, I would like to think, humbly, attests to thisâ a city almost the world, o who is almost a
