Check it out:
Alyson Gold Weinberg serves as a poetic tour guide for how it feels and what it signifies to be a human being, taking us from embryos to adulthood, bearing witness at all times to the myriad joys and sorrows on offer. This collection abounds with empathy, intelligence, and the type of insight earned through lived experience. From a drowned—and doomed—Ophelia forgetting she can fly, or the somber wisdom of a woman addressing her 11-year-old self, we attend the stations of the cross all women navigate, their worlds at times ebullient, but often fraught with doubt and fear, and always redeemed by love. There are many relatable, necessary concerns expressed in these pages, but mostly Bellow & Hiss is a poignant reminder of what it means to be alive.
That’s a blurb from yours truly, having been fortunate enough to read an advanced copy of this collection. Suffice it to say, I’ve been looking forward to hearing Alyson read –and discuss– her poetry, for almost a year!
As usual, it was a joy to gather in person at D.C.’s historic Potter’s House, and 1455 continues to appreciate our partnership (check them out, and get your copies of Bellow & Hiss via their site to support independent booksellers!).
So, a bit more about Bellow & Hiss: it would be at once accurate but not nearly sufficient to suggest this collection interrogates womanhood, from this inside out and vice versa; it navigates common feelings from a variety of angles and ages. For instance, we empathize with the head space of an eleven-year-old, we inhabit Ophelia’s body, we see a mother giving birth. This is very much a poet’s poetry, and I particularly appreciate how the poems themselves weave in between observation and experience, shuffling back and forth in time and eschewing linear time for how thought and memory operate: they are crooked lines constantly criss-crossing.
In the wonderfully titled “Ars Pandemica” there’s a line I think we all not not only can relate to, but once again utilizes Alyson’s keen ability to succinctly cover lots of ground in a phrase. She writes “I must remake what is broken,” obliging us to consider how this sentiment functions in the poem as well as the world of Covid, but more, how a mother, or a woman, or a poet, looks at her role (our roles) in the world. We discuss that (the poems, Alyson’s experience writing them, what else she’s been working on, and why being an active part of the literary community is crucial) in the video, below. Enjoy!
ABOUT THE BOOK
“Riding shotgun with Oedipus, your mother, and the pothole in your heart,” Bellow & Hiss navigates generational
“Alyson Gold Weinberg’s Bellow & Hiss sings with a poignant ache and beauty that makes music in its language and stark imagery. These poems are historic, gritty, and deeply personal—coiled in wild earth and cosmically bittersweet moments. “Like a willow whose very name means lamentation,” Weinberg weaves trauma to transcendence, sorrow to heart, and heart to human empathy. “I must remake what is broken … embroidering a story—no back space, no back space—distracting from loss, tending the presence of love—forever ending a line by beginning the next one.”
–Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alyson Gold Weinberg is an award-winning poet, playwright, speechwriter and ghostwriter. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including December, Poetica, District Fray, and others. She is a 2021 Jeff Marks Memorial Prize finalist, winner of the both the 2021 Inner Loop Poetry Prize, 2021 Derick Burleson Poetry Prize, a 2022 Harbor Review Jewish Women’s Poetry Prize finalist, and a 2022 New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition finalist. Her play, Object Relations, had its live-streamed staged reading premiere during the pandemic to benefit mental health equity, and a fully staged production is in the works.
