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by Bianca Stone
With a nod to her grandmother Ruth Stone's poem "The Mobius Strip of Grief," Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.
The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay - dearly, with both money and conscience - to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: "$20 for five minutes. I'll hold your hand in my own," one ghost says. "I'll tell you you were good to me." Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life.
"Starred Review. [A] collection that features a bravely vulnerable beating heart hidden beneath layers of irony and clever misdirection. Stone is the child of her muses, Sexton and Emily Dickinson, and it is an odd but delightful union." - Publishers Weekly
"Meditative and darkly entertaining, vivid and visceral, a little bit out-of-control, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is filled with tired bodies, bodies with scars, other women poets, and members of Stone's own family - including a grandmother who herself is being grieved. This is a poetry collection like few you'll come across." - Bustle
"Staff Pick. Fantastically unsettling and sparks a serious meditation on grief and family, from a distinctly feminine perspective... [Stone] populates her poems with characters that range from Emily Dickinson to her grandmother, and the result is the feeling that we are witnessing a soul's intimate reckoning with life." - The Paris Review
"Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation's emerging pathology and sensibility." - John Ashbery
This information about The Mobius Strip Club of Grief was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Bianca Stone is a poet and visual artist. She's the author of the poetry collection Someone Else's Wedding Vows, Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours, and contributing artist/collaborator on a special illustrated edition of Anne Carson's Antigonick from New Directions. Bianca co-founded, and edits, Monk Books and chairs The Ruth Stone Foundation, based in Goshen, VT and Brooklyn, NY.
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