Mouth Art of the Bald-faced Hornet - by Betsy Bolton (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Mouth Art of the Bald-faced Hornet explores the interwoven human and natural histories of a local creek and woodland through the process of colonial settlement to the present day. Juxtaposing lyrics of the present with historical accounting, these poems engage the human stories shaping natural history while riffing on what it might mean to read a local landscape over time. Botany, reproductive strategies, fairy tales, forgotten atrocities, and deep history all suggest different possibilities for human relationships with one another and with the extra-human world. While engaging with embedded violence, abuse, and loss, these poems still insist on beauty, yearning, and the potential for transformation.

Review Quotes

Crum Creek, in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia, reflects the state of thousands of America's small waterways-flowing under culverts and through dwindling woods, its historic and ecological significance forgotten or disregarded, its presence largely hidden from our eyes. Yet this creek sustained the Indigenous people of the area, and played a crucial role for early European settlers as well, its water powering local mills, driving local industry. "For years I passed, unseeing," Betsy Bolton writes, that confession prompting us too to witness the spiraling fiddleheads "peeking / through brown papery wrapping / as if an old-time grocer had left them"; the bald-faced hornet "spit-balling her palace ... of layered paper" to devise a "pendulous world"; the "sentinel" sycamores "spinning wood from air." Yet, in the midst of wonder, these crucial poems also call on us to recognize "the poison" we've brought to creek and forest, to acknowledge our "mottled history," to refuse to "look away." As she tracks the colonized Crum Creek landscape and simultaneously celebrates its intricacy, its beauty, its resilience, Betsy Bolton invites us to commit ourselves to action, to "reviving the ripples and pools of our past."

-Nathalie Anderson, author of Stain and Rough