University of Nevada Press
76 pages
March 4, 2025
In her new collection, Far Country, Kyce Bello documents an unmapped territory in which loss becomes a medium for deepening connection and love. In poems firmly rooted in the Southwestern bioregion, landscape and language are layered into vivid sequences where the personal, collective, and ecological merge and illuminate one another. Ultimately, the collection forms a new map of the unknown, traveling to a realm in which worlds both seen and unseen are fused into a rich tapestry of lyric exploration and wonder. In the poem, “The Bend,” a woman asks, “How do we survive this?” Far Country is not an answer, but a witnessing and embrace that becomes its own act of resilience and transformation.
Kyce Bello was the inaugural winner of the Test Site Poetry Prize with her debut collection, Refugia, which also received the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award. Bello edited the award-winning anthology The Return of the River, a work of literary activism.