Poetry

“E.C. Belli’s poems are magical. Her poems are intense lyrical distillates, capturing sorrow, or melancholy, or dreamy reverie through the alchemy of music that pulls at my heartstrings. Her poems are lullabies, lamentations, love songs, apostrophes to alter egos that praise the inclement weather of our interior moods. Whimsical, sultry and weighted with grief, A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep is a collection of poems existing on a plane that is between waking and sleeping; it is a portrait of a beautiful and exquisitely perceptive subconscious.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning and Dance Dance Revolution

“When Sappho was asked to define beauty, she answered “Some people say it’s a herd of black horses in the grass, some people say it’s a fleet of warships leaving the harbor. I say beauty is whatever you love.” Reading E.C. Belli’s sensational A Sleep That Is Not Our Sleep, I kept thinking of that bit of Sappho, thinking of Belli’s remarkable affinity for rendering with precision and acuity what is beloved, what is lovable, and what is unloved but worthy of it. One page reads, in its entirety, “little clavicle bone, you grew // things grow well in me.” The verse odes the beauty of a bone, yes, but also the beauty of a self capable of growing and sustaining what it’s made. In this collection stones whisper in the night, eyes mend into dials. The poem “Hues” is worth the sticker price alone. To say it simply: Belli has written a singular collection, one I’ll be learning from for years.“ —Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell and Calling A Wolf A Wolf

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“The short spiky-lined lyrics of E. C. Belli are compressed only on the surface of the page; in the ear they are resonant, in the mind they unfold rooms of thought. Belli’s forms are smart, her voice is sure. This is not a haunted world; it is a world that itself haunts: with dark wit and a tender touch.”—Kazim Ali, author of Inquisition

“In her strongest poems, Belli’s styptic precision amounts to a vigilance verging on a cosmogony. She is perhaps the purest (not to mention most fiercely feminist) heir of Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Siegfried Sassoon: where there is blood there is also the promise of intimacy, and a gauge by which to measure it, whether she’s speaking of war, romantic passion, or childbirth. These are stately poems that cut toward the reader, then offer themselves up as bandages.”—G. C. Waldrep, author of feast gently and Testament

“In these playful and ethereal poems that constitute E.C. Belli’s intimate debut collection, the poet seeks for Seamus Heaney’s ‘immortelles of perfect pitch,’ in which each word glows and hums a tune, an emotion, an observation, a (non)-narrative or lyrical detail … ‘My feet are short sentences,’ she muses. Of books and their lives, she thinks out loud, ‘I remember / going home, / letting their names / out into the fields.’ At once simple and complex, these polished verses feel like pebbles, other times strings. They also remind me of haikus, their art of seduction, distance, and understatement. Despite their hunger and deceivingly short breath, Belli’s ‘poetic objects’ are fresh, intelligent, and sensitive to the presence—or absence—of an elusive ‘other’: an otherworldly existence and realm where one might be reticent to name the absolute, yet ready to embrace the unseen and unknown.”—Fiona Sze-Lorrain, author of The Ruined Elegance, My Funeral Gondola, and Water the Moon

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Plein Jeu, Accents Publishing (2011), Winner of the 2010 Poetry Chapbook Contest, Editor’s Choice Award

“Belli is a poet with an ear not for a language but for languages. The music in Plein Jeu is indeed the music of a chorus, and a gorgeous one. French voices sing in these English poems and what a delight to hear them. Belli knows what poetry is meant to do. She takes the words we use each day and makes us hear them anew.” –Idra Novey, author of The Next Country

“Belli writes brilliantly, achingly, of the mysterious power and tenuousness of our loves; of nature that surrounds us, in cycles of sensual, redemptive beauty.” –Emily Fragos, author of Little Savage and Hostage

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Selected Poems & Short Prose

“Vows” – Poem-A-Day (selected by Kazim Ali)

“Vows” – The Best American Poetry (Scribner, 2022) (selected by Matthew Zapruder)

“Expectations” and “Evolution” – The Normal School

“Three Liquid Miniatures” – Cutbank

“Death Toll” – Verse Daily

“A Month of Grievances” – VERSE

“What Makes the Dawn Breathable” – AGNI

“Botany,” “In All Probability,” and “The Other Half” – Colorado Review

“What Was Said” and “Tête-à-tête” – The Offing

“The Gray Against Your Skin” – The Florida Review

“The Douaumont Ossuary” – The Dalhousie Review

“Vol de Nuit,” “Monochrome,” and “La Buée” – PO&SIE

“La Lune et ma mère,” “La Naissance des étoiles,” and “Le Dernier Jour sur terre” – Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle

“Petit Soir,” “Les Orphelins,” “Congrégation,” and “Portrait de Nuit” – Voix d’Encre

Poems and short prose have appeared in The Antioch Review, Caketrain, Western Humanities Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Poetry Salzburg, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Also in Fiction Southeast, The Collagist, and Master’s Review, among others.

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Recognition

Appendix: A Dissertation in Verse – Finalist for the National Poetry Series 2025

An Ontology of Ferns – Finalist for the 2020 X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize (judge: Maggie Smith)

The Perfect Whispers of their Husks – Finalist for the 2017 Quarterly West Chapbook Contest (Short Stories)

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Reflections on craft

“A Spread of Phosphorus: Interview with E.C. Belli” – The Rupture

“E.C. Belli’s “Hues” – Thoughts on individuality” by Devin Kelly – Ordinary Plots