Ardor

Marvin Bell's stunning new poems address and redefine--and ultimately embrace--aging, entropy, abundance, error, comedy, and horror in the active life. Composed with an elastic line, the poems of "Ardor" transcend time and place, breaking down distinctions between notions of living and dying, transcribing a life lived at the fingertips. Bell reinvigorates the quotidian by bearing witness in a voice by turns surreal, questioning, outrageous and deadpan, but always incisive, returning inevitably to love as the paradigm: "The dead man's thought is visceral and unconditional, love as it was intended when the river met the shore."