The Northway - (Terrapin Poetry) by Lisa Bellamy (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

This hilarious, imaginative book packs cigarette butts, Buddhist prayer flags, a spastic colon, Leviathan jaws, and gnats reincarnating as neonatal nurses into just one poem. Others say "Yes, to grunts and drooling"; find a Zen master in a bobcat spotted while driving; and experience an epiphany while driving with closed eyes. Bellamy's humor is a lens exposing our foibles, fears, and loveliness. Her unstinting, self-implicating humor skewers culture, "I eat only fresh, locally sourced sadness," and politics, religion, gender roles, and relationships, "swinging [her] axe at the root of delusion."
--April Ossmann, Event Boundaries

Review Quotes

Lisa Bellamy's The Northway delves not only into nature with its moles and mites, wild pansies and clouds of white crickets, but also deeply into the nature of what it means to be human: marriage, alcoholism, sexting, and biopsies. For Bellamy, it seems, anything can--and must--go into a poem. Beautifully crafted, her litanies and juxtapositions aren't afraid to wrestle with the hard stuff, but ultimately, they offer us what we all want: to land on our feet and get a little TLC. --Nicole Callihan, Superloop

It's impossible to stop quoting Lisa Bellamy's marvelous poems in her mesmerizing book, The Northway. Impossible because the language, imagery, and passionate imagination are irresistible, absolutely so. Hers is a world of spiritual and magical wonders, adorning wild pansies, squishy roads, sly, frilly-hatted debutante bees, black-eyed Susans confessing rather sexy stories of life among the peepers where bark-eaters are all walking north, "surviving yet another frozen night." I could go on and if there's any fairness in this world, I will. Believe me, I will. --Philip Schultz, 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner