I Was a Bell

Name: I Was a Bell
Brand: Hachette Aotearoa New Zealand
SKU: 9781597094900
Price: 34.99 NZD
Availability: InStock

By M. Soledad Caballero

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4.29

( 42 ratings, 6 reviews)

Summary

I Was a Bell by M. Soledad Caballero is an evocative poetry collection exploring the interplay of memory, identity, and history. Through interwoven poems, Caballero reflects on her childhood lived across languages and countries, from dictatorship-era Chile to immigrant life in the United States. The work delves into how past traumas and personal experiences—such as illness and political exile—shape present identity, revealing the complex legacies carried within bodies and memories without neatly reconciling past and present.
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Format: Paperback / softback

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I Was a Bell

$34⁹⁹

Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This collection will resonate deeply with readers interested in arts and culture, especially those drawn to poetry that explores themes of migration, memory, political history, and personal resilience. It is suited for audiences who appreciate profound, lyrical reflections on identity and trauma.

In this collection, Caballero imagines how memory frames and reshapes the present, how memory illuminates and limits the stories of ourselves, and how, despite the passage of time, primal moments in the past are the ghosts and echoes of our present.

Description

Winner of the 2021 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry Award for Outstanding Book

Gold Medalist in the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award - One Author - English

These poems interweave an early childhood lived in another country and in another language with experiences of immigration and family histories in the United States. They create connections between a child's naïve perspective of dictatorship and an adult perspective informed by bodily illness and political knowledge.

Ultimately, Caballero traces a lineage of memory, exploring how present moments unearth the past that ripples through them. This collection does not reconcile the past and the present. Instead, these poems remind us that how we ask questions about ourselves, our histories, and our bodies is what creates our identities, our traumas, and our future hopes and possibilities.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Praised as "a triumph" by Natalia Sylvester for its poignant portrayal of migration, memory, and exile, the collection has been hailed by Richard Blanco for its unflinching witness to emotional trauma and transformative attention to detail. The Pittsburgh City Paper commends Caballero for breathing life into language through her engagement with both poetry and cancer diagnosis.

Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9781597094900

Publisher: Red Hen Press

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 21 October 2021

Country: United States

Imprint: Red Hen Press

Illustration: Illustrations

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Width: 152.0mm

Height: 228.0mm

Weight: 250g

Pages: 96

Collections

Arts & Culture M. Soledad Caballero Non-Fiction Poetry

About the Author

M. Soledad Caballero is a professor of English at Allegheny College. Her scholarly work focuses on British Romanticism, travel writing, postcolonial literatures, WGSS, and interdisciplinarity. She is a CantoMundo fellow, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, has been a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffry E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry, the Mississippi Review’s annual Editors’ prize, the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and the Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. Her poem “Myths We Tell” won the 2019 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize for Cutthroat: a Journal of the Arts. She is a co-recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Connections Grant, as well as a Great Lakes Colleges Association Expanding Collaborations Initiative Grant. Her first poetry collection won the 2019 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award sponsored by Red Hen Press. Caballero splits her time between Meadville and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.