Bell I Wake To takes a magnifying glass to all living things and gives them a greater meaning and purpose, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant. Crane's vivid and precise language paints beautiful, and sometimes bittersweet, familial scenes while contending with heavy topics like death, loss, grief, and healing.
"From the opening lines of this stunning collection, I am immediately and irrevocably invested in what this speaker has to say, the many worlds and wounds and healings she weaves through bright, immediate, richly developed image, lexicon, and description. The whole of me responds to these poems, the tenderness and unflinching courage wrapped amidst the foliage and wildlife of the speaker's garden. The spareness in the syntax and line juxtaposed with the poignant storytelling of these poems captures my imagination, as the mothering/daughtering strength of Bell I Wake To is immense and fills me with light." --Jenn Givhan, Author of Girl With Death Mask
"The poems in Bell I Wake To create a sacred space honoring seasons, generations, the body, and every living creature the poet comes across. Patty Crane writes with the kind of attention Simone Weil says is close to prayer, and indeed under her gaze everything is blessedly alive with song and shimmer, present in its leafing out and its leaving. Her supple language can transform a white birch into a mouthful of sunrise and then to the flush on a young girl's cheek. "My subject is surprise," the poet says, the kind of surprise that comes from precise seeing, vivid language and the sly humor of one who knows how quickly the ordinary can turn and amaze. This is a beautiful book, a crucial presence in our scattered world." --Betsy Sholl, author of House of Sparrows: New and Selected Poems
"The intimate and exquisite exactitude with which Patty Crane meets the natural world is remarkable. Bell I Wake To brims with keen-eyed, tender noticing—bats are "tin origami," the snake her spade delivers is "a length of slow-moving muscle," and finches are "singing wanting." Our pleasure is further deepened by how fluidly outer and inner worlds spill into one another, as when a flower's blush of color brings back "the flush / of a daughter's cheeks as she sits in the bath weeping" or "the sudden tree of her / standing beside me." This book is calibrated to be quietly piercing." --Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager
Patty Crane is the author of BELL I WAKE TO (Zone 3 Press First Book Award, 2019) and something flown (Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award, 2018), and translator of THE BLUE HOUSE: Collected Works of Tomas Tranströmer (Copper Canyon Press, 2023) and BRIGHT SCYTHE (Sarabande Books, 2015), her selected translations of the Swedish Nobel laureate. Her poetry has appeared widely in journals, most recently in Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry Daily, Poetry East, and Vox. Her translations have recently appeared in American Poets, Poetry, Five Points, and Guernica. Her work has been supported by fellowships from MacDowell and Hedgebrook. A third generation Cape Cod native, she divides her time between the hilltowns of western Massachusetts and the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.
