"Mehmet Sniffing a Rose"
from Lillias Bever's
Bellini in Istanbul

Lillias Bever:

Lillias Bever grew up in Princeton, N.J., received a B.A. from Vassar College, and an M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Seneca Review, Pleiades, and other places, and has been featured on Poetry Daily. She has been a resident at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts, and the recipient of a Seattle Arts Commission award and a literature fellowship from Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission.

About Bellini in Istanbul:

Tupelo Press Judge's Prize
Selected by Michael Collier

"Reading Bellini in Istanbul, I was constantly reminded of Calvino's Invisible Cities, for Lillias Bever's richly-textured poems 'arrive,' as she tells us, at 'the boundary or our lives... saddled in the smoke of the other world.' This smoke is a form of memory and invention, a gauze or veil, through which we find the borderlands of experience to be an expansive geography, where what is real is imagined and what is imagined is real. Bellini in Istanbul is a sophisticated book, a formal and imaginative tour de force."
— Michael Collier, Judge of the 2004 Tupelo Press competition

"Bellini in Istanbul has the finish of voice present in the best poetry – the report on experience and travel of the most interesting people and the reflective tone of a cultivated inner voice. Though I treasure its descriptive pieces – Italian scenes, Turkish fish markets, comments on The Blue Guide – what touches most are the poems that intermingle the exotic with the deeply personal – a relationship gone bad in a foreign land, then a new one aborning; a chronicle of carrying and birthing a child couched in terms of Greek myth, and the crisp observations of the world turned into the dreamwork which is poetry. Lillias Bever is a gorgeous poet, traveled and travailed, seeking a home in her own strophes."
— Garrett Hongo

"There's a lovely confident fluency in the poems assembled in Lillias Bever's first collection, the sense of someone operating easily in a language that's part thought, part sensuousness — the thoughts coming in fractured and elliptical snatches of feeling-finding-words, mimicking the strobe activity of consciousness, trying to do justice to that flickering..."
— Eamon Grennan

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