Finalist for the New England Book Award in Poetry and the Vermont Book Award
As heard on NPR Morning Edition
A New York Public Library Best Book of 2022
A searching, startling new collection of poems from the author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief and Someone Else's Wedding Vows
Written in four sections with incisive and vivid lyrical language, Bianca Stone's What Is Otherwise Infinite considers how we find our place in the world through themes of philosophy, religion, environment, myth, and psychology. "I deal only in the hardest pain-revivers, symbols and tongues," writes Stone. "I want to tell you only / in the intimacy of our discomfort."
Populated by Archangels, limping in paradise; by allergies of the soul; the intimacy and danger of motherhood; psychic wounds; and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake, What Is Otherwise Infinite deftly examines our inherent and inherited ideas of how to live, and the experience of the Self-which on one hand is so intensely personal, and on the other, universal. Stone's poems reframe the search for meaning by addressing the self-care and self-perfection complex. Because even though it's natural to want to "fix" our lives-sometimes obsessing over our lives can work against us.-NPR Morning Edition
Poems that bounce off ordinary moments to attain something extraordinary.-The Washington Post, Ron Charles' Book Club
Roams in the realm of religion and philosophy.-The New York Times
Stone casts our everyday experiences in mythic language, lifting even the mundane anxieties of a sleepless night to new philosophical heights.-New York Public Library
In poems that reference "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Virginia Woolf with the same ease as noise music and Star Trek, Bianca Stone's latest collection looks at the dark things that live in us all-shame, depression, doubt, addiction-and reminds us that even Christ spent "forty days in the desert / with what he thought was the Devil / but was really just himself." This is the moral questioning of Dante and Milton updated with a contemporary gallows humor and the 21st century's grappling with the existential fear of climate change and capitalism. "That's purgatory, baby."
-Timothy Otte, LitHub
An unflinching portrait of motherhood. . . . A mixture of honesty and strangeness that is distinctive.-Poetry Foundation
Deftly weaves between the physical and the metaphysical, the daily domestic trials of life and the larger trials of being human in this world, this universe.-Literary North
What is Otherwise Infinite is a collection that seeks to erase horizons and any other lines left between us and what is sublime.
-Full Stop
A courageous, erudite inquiry into an intellectual woman's fracturing identities.-Seven Days
Stone's work brilliantly combines nature, existence, and our sense of place in the world.-PSU Vanguard
If Bianca Stone and a hundred other humans witness the same event, it is Stone's version you want to read. She's that particular, that powerful.-Revolute
As refreshingly ambitious in its intent as it is electric in its meanings.-On the Seawall
Combines sharp-witted philosophizing with breathtaking honest reflections of the self.-The Poetry Question
Incisive, tender and playful. . . . This honest, piercing collection addresses the wayward heart of modern society, pointing at the world-and even at the self-and asking for a revaluation.-Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Investigates the ways we find our place in the world.-Library Journal
Whether dealing with alcoholism, motherhood, climate change or literature, Stone faces each difficult truth. She does not shrink from the hard facts, preferring to look at them square and then allow her language to refract them back to the reader in sharp, crystalline focus.-Shelf Awareness
This is like moral baroque and also an invitation to make things. I feel enclosed by something guiding h
