At 7:30pm EST, on Thursday, September 29th, poet Bianca Stone will read her work as part of the 2022 Prout Chapel Reading Series, hosted by Bowling Green State University. This event will take place virtually, via Zoom.
Bianca Stone is a writer and artist from Vermont. She has published several books of poetry and hybrid work including Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief, and What is Otherwise Infinite. In Vermont, Stone teaches on poetry and consciousness, and serves as Creative Director for The Ruth Stone House literary nonprofit and studio. Her poems, essays, and comics may be found in Poetry Magazine, Powder Keg, The Rumpus, American Poetry Review, Conduit, and elsewhere.
Bianca Stone’s work strikes a keen balance between existential woe and items of human scale; her precision, as well as her ability to forge significance through detail, never flags. Her poems frequently wrestle, as many poems do, with what it means “to be,” though Stone’s work sets itself apart from others examining the same questions by nature of its careful attention to, and occupation of, varied existential positions. “It is said this planet came to be / when I was pulled apart,” says God, in her poem “God Searches for God.” And whether embodying God, barbers, or the ego-space of self-realization, Stone uses poetry as a lens through which she looks not at, but through the self.
That said, these poems do not often linger in overtly heady territory, rooting their questions of belonging and meaningful existence instead in wine bottles, artichokes, and plastic sports apparel. “I thought we fit well in the bottle from the wine club,” Stone writes in “Even Moon,” “though I wasn’t happy with the grape.” It is in these always vivid details where Stone’s eye for poetically expedient gestures toward existential questions is most apparent. However, she also expresses that a cost sometimes accompanies such rapt attention; in “Again Trying to Write a Poem About a B&W Photograph of a Wolf” Stone writes that “at times poetry fills me with loathing / for what cannot be left alone.” Indeed, these poems peel scabs and worry at wounds, making meaning as much from what is in us as the little things which surround us, intriguing us and causing us pain.
—Samuel Burt, MAR
“And of having felt
like a small event for so long—having felt
like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,
one scale at a time, worked down
to the meaty heart, but with the ultimate
disappointment of meager flesh—
of being thus, I bet I will live again.”
—From Bianca Stone’s poem “Artichokes”
(Poems and biographical detail courtesy of poetrycomics.org)