Bel Schenk
The lights go out just before dark.
There is a blackout in the city
and people blame lightning.
There are many different ways to tell this story.
This is one of them.
Praise for Every Time You Close Your Eyes:
'Bel Schenk tells the story of disparate characters sharing New York City through two blackouts. Through a blunt poetic style infused with subtle irony and a tact for laying down a soul (Deep inside is exactly what you are thinking right now) Schenk adheres to people wanting to connect, with each other and with themselves. Every Time You Close Your Eyes is a work of intense atmospheric enquiry.' - Heather Taylor Johnson
'Building to a subtle crescendo, this intriguing story offers a sharp insight to the fragile underbelly of a hardened, indefatigable metropolis.' - H. Gardiner, SCAN online journal for educators
'Bel adds another chapter to that story of the city and the summer, the way the heat twists things to craziness, pushes people to the edge of their tolerance, forces change through the rips that it opens up. There is a feeling after some of those nights, where you sit up until dawn through sheer lack of alternatives, that something must have changed, that a certain drama has been made manifest, and with the sun starting to signal its return to the streets you yourself can’t possibly be the same.' - Geoff Lemon
'There is a knowingness, an ambiguity at the heart of Schenk's poetry that resists easy labels.' - Geoffrey Lehmann, Australian
'Easy to read. Its power is in its sensitivity. It could easily be used for Secondary Study, looking at Prose poetry.' - Carolyn Hull, ReadPlus
'Schenk's characters are fully realised and have their own complexities ... they are emblematic of certain human types and attitudes, they also project their own individuality and the reader does come to care about them.' - Geoff Page, Age
'Every Time You Close Your Eyes makes a solid and original contribution through which readers can see the verse novel anew – as mutable and dynamic in its ongoing negotiations with genres, techniques and forms.' - Linda Weste, Text, Vol 19, No 1
'Sparsely written, yet deeply self-aware ... Schenk’s Every Time You Close Your Eyes shows how poetry can represent moments of time with stunning concentration.' - Autumn Royal, Cordite Poetry Review
'The inflections with which Bel Schenk greets that odd couple, urban love and urban loneliness, are all her own.' - J.M. Coetzee, on Ambulances and Dreamers
Bel Schenk is the author of the poetry collections Ambulances & Dreamers and Urban Squeeze. She lives in Melbourne.
There is a blackout in the city
and people blame lightning.
There are many different ways to tell this story.
This is one of them.
Praise for Every Time You Close Your Eyes:
'Bel Schenk tells the story of disparate characters sharing New York City through two blackouts. Through a blunt poetic style infused with subtle irony and a tact for laying down a soul (Deep inside is exactly what you are thinking right now) Schenk adheres to people wanting to connect, with each other and with themselves. Every Time You Close Your Eyes is a work of intense atmospheric enquiry.' - Heather Taylor Johnson
'Building to a subtle crescendo, this intriguing story offers a sharp insight to the fragile underbelly of a hardened, indefatigable metropolis.' - H. Gardiner, SCAN online journal for educators
'Bel adds another chapter to that story of the city and the summer, the way the heat twists things to craziness, pushes people to the edge of their tolerance, forces change through the rips that it opens up. There is a feeling after some of those nights, where you sit up until dawn through sheer lack of alternatives, that something must have changed, that a certain drama has been made manifest, and with the sun starting to signal its return to the streets you yourself can’t possibly be the same.' - Geoff Lemon
'There is a knowingness, an ambiguity at the heart of Schenk's poetry that resists easy labels.' - Geoffrey Lehmann, Australian
'Easy to read. Its power is in its sensitivity. It could easily be used for Secondary Study, looking at Prose poetry.' - Carolyn Hull, ReadPlus
'Schenk's characters are fully realised and have their own complexities ... they are emblematic of certain human types and attitudes, they also project their own individuality and the reader does come to care about them.' - Geoff Page, Age
'Every Time You Close Your Eyes makes a solid and original contribution through which readers can see the verse novel anew – as mutable and dynamic in its ongoing negotiations with genres, techniques and forms.' - Linda Weste, Text, Vol 19, No 1
'Sparsely written, yet deeply self-aware ... Schenk’s Every Time You Close Your Eyes shows how poetry can represent moments of time with stunning concentration.' - Autumn Royal, Cordite Poetry Review
'The inflections with which Bel Schenk greets that odd couple, urban love and urban loneliness, are all her own.' - J.M. Coetzee, on Ambulances and Dreamers
Bel Schenk is the author of the poetry collections Ambulances & Dreamers and Urban Squeeze. She lives in Melbourne.