Francesca Bell: “I wrote this poem after reading an article about how, in Italy, doctors no longer intubate anyone over the age of 60. The United States hasn’t yet reached that point, but we seem far likelier to achieve the catastrophe of Italy than we do to arrive at the relative calm of South Korea, so it got me thinking about my 74-year-old husband. I make the groceries last as long as possible, but after going out today, I had to wonder if I’d carried a death sentence home to that beloved, maddening man.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I live with my husband and two children on a sunny acre of hillside. We’ve a pumpkin patch, and barn owls nesting in the oak trees, and a red-tailed hawk that perches on our fence to contemplate the songbirds. I start poems for the same reason I toss seed into this rich, dark earth: to see what grows from what at first looks like nothing.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I read with interest and a strange sadness many articles about Opportunity, the long-lived Mars rover, finally being declared dead. There was something somehow human about the robot, and I found myself thinking of her as I interacted with the 3D x-ray machine that was used to perform my mammogram. I had also been reading during the week of the collapsing insect world and the melting glaciers and the cataclysm that was to come but is actually, in slow motion, already upon us.” (web)
Max Sessner: “Why do I love poems? Every morning, I rode the bus from the village into the city to school. At one station, the old poet boarded. He was fat and looked friendly, a little like Pablo Neruda. He seated himself with the women who were also riding into the city. Unexpectedly, he began to recite his poems. The women laughed. I was impressed. They maybe weren’t especially good poems, but what does that mean? For a moment, the bus was a driving poem, and I sat inside it.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I discovered Max Sessner’s poems in an Austrian journal called Manuskripte five months ago. Since then, I have translated 39 of them. His poems have a delicious combination of deep melancholy and dark humor, a mixture I am unable to resist, one I return to again and again. I’m proud and grateful to be the first person to translate his beautiful work into English.” (web)
Max Sessner: “Why do I love poems? Every morning, I rode the bus from the village into the city to school. At one station, the old poet boarded. He was fat and looked friendly, a little like Pablo Neruda. He seated himself with the women who were also riding into the city. Unexpectedly, he began to recite his poems. The women laughed. I was impressed. They maybe weren’t especially good poems, but what does that mean? For a moment, the bus was a driving poem, and I sat inside it.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I discovered Max Sessner’s poems in an Austrian journal called Manuskripte five months ago. Since then, I have translated 39 of them. His poems have a delicious combination of deep melancholy and dark humor, a mixture I am unable to resist, one I return to again and again. I’m proud and grateful to be the first person to translate his beautiful work into English.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I write poetry in an attempt to draw as close as possible to the world around me and to the people in it. For me, poetry should be intimate, bare, wild, and a little ragged. If you can’t go for your own jugular, you shouldn’t write.” (web)
Francesca Bell: “I wrote this poem in response to news reports this past week about Marilou Danley’s fingerprints being on the ammunition used by Stephen Paddock in the Las Vegas massacre. I feel great empathy for Ms. Danley. When I was young, I had serious relationships with two different gun enthusiasts. These men owned many different guns—including assault rifles—and one I shared a home with for three years. I spent many Sunday afternoons at one gun range or another back then, and I handled all kinds of ammunition and firearms. One boyfriend was a police officer and the other an avid hunter, so the possibility existed that my fingerprints might have been found on a bullet that had ended a life. Additionally, I’ve personally known four individuals who have killed someone. Three of the killings were sanctioned by the state, and one ended in a prison sentence. Though I was appalled and astonished by the enormity of what each man had done, my emotional attachment to them remained. I did not stop loving them. I imagine Marilou Danley still loves Stephen Paddock. I imagine she misses him, despite everything. And I imagine she is haunted to think of where her fingers’ prints have been, of what suffering was inflicted there.” (web)
