Someone Else's Wedding Vows

by Bianca Stone

The much-anticipated debut collection from a celebrated young poet, Someone Else's Wedding Vows marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in American poetry. Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

Genres: Poetry, Relationships

88 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City where she received her MFA from NYU in 2009. Her poems, poetry comics, and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review and many others.

She has returned to Vermont with her husband and collaborator, the poet Ben Pease, where she is director of programs for The Ruth Stone House, a literary nonprofit artist residency, letterpress studio and community poetry center.

Reviews

[Jason]

Stone's poetry does what, in my humble opinion, all good, well-written poetry should do: It confuses; it enlightens; it challenges; it pulls one by the hand, puts its lips up to your ear and whispers some secret for the first time. Each line carries in it some beautiful meaning to be gleaned. Each line refuses simplicity, but begs to be understood, something that is captured in the lines, "And it's true / I spent my whole life in fear of sharing my mind / but with a longing for it to be taken." Weird without ever seeming gimmicky, Stone's poetry comes from that place deep down inside all of us that we refuse to acknowledge, but know is a part of each of us.

[Michael]

from Someone Else's Wedding Vows by Bianca Stone

Letter

Just before dawn the kings come out
and plant the heads of their children in the ground.
I am walking the long passageway to the bathroom
where a metaphysical play is opened to the first page.
Another hurricane rubs against the old master.
Later the kings take their children
like aspirin. They are afraid their children
will be content without them. I am watching a bird
wade into the slush. Even people who don't know
or like me, want to know what I think.
They name my invention after me.
They roll it out into the parking garage
and meet secretly with it.
My machine whispers your pseudonym.
My machine creates a rubbery
wind. It translates a letter that comes
addressed to someone else
with my same, perfumed
and ignorant name.

[Kevin]

I like her formal use of the word "Monsieur" in the long poem of the same name (filled with a bitter sort of sweetness). I also liked the other long poem, "Practicing Vigilance." A lot of great lines throughout but her style is best when the momentum gets going. Really nice cover art too.

[J.A.]

This book hails words. Each poem is pressurized with magnificent tone, forged with the tidy and clever lingo of a poet who knows how to wield language. This is the real deal.

[Christina Baswell]

This is navel-gazing that does not come off as obnoxiously self-centered. It was oracular and simultaneously down to earth. She may just be my new favorite poet.

[Hannah]

Even in the window box we fit

even in the dog's collapsed grave

even in the wreck

and everyday

-Even Moon

Someone Else's Wedding Vows is poet Bianca Stone's full length debut collection. A raw, emotional, beautiful collection of poetry that ranges from topics in varying degrees such as traveling to space, marriage, relationships, and being. She takes a simple concept and transforms it into something whole and immense. There wasn't a poem in her collection I didn't love. Her book is earmarked relentlessly. There are hidden truths in her words. Meanings we have to look for, but have no problem doing so.

Her collection is one of the more cohesive collections I have read in some time. It flows beautiful. Each poem melting seamlessly into the next. They leave you wanting more. At the end, I was desperate for more. I earmarked the last page. I had to. I won't share with you the last passage of Practicing Vigilance, but it really resonated with me. The whole poem, really.

For full review go to indiewritergirl0329.wordpress.com

[Sharon]

A new favorite. I haven't genuinely felt something (by 'feeling' I mean literal chills) from poetry from a long while. Throughout the course of the book, I began to develop an affection for the author, for her eccentricity and boldness and frailty, and sordid humor.

[Sarah]

Really drawn to this. I've finished it, but will be carrying it around for awhile.

[Danielle Mebert]

I never thought I'd read a poem inspired by Star Trek: Voyager. Happy that the one in this book is so very good.

[Will]

I struggled with this collection. Bianca Stone certainly knows her way around words often writing evocative imagery and breathtaking phrases but I often get lost in her poems.

[Annie]

Bianca Stone's poems are so crisp and modern. But not in a grating way. Some of the most memorable lines from this collection:

*I cannot love like a ninepin./Not like the lane./Not like the blue shoe.

*I looked in the mirror this morning and I felt my age/like a tremor from a distant fundraiser.

*I saw my mother flume/toward the abyss and draw back...

*I'm reading the poems of the dead./I feel no sense of religion except this./Each hand like a bastard on my lap./I am thinking of the size of a darkness in my palms.

*The whole horrendous herd/gallops in me. Know/when you hold me/you hold us all.

[John Allen]

Poet Bianca Stone is certainly at the height of her powers in this collection, with probably 3 poems that actually constitute as great and almost great. Most of her poems are existential reflections with meditations on romance, the one seamlessly flowing in the other. I read one poem from this collection and scanned not much further to realize it was a must-read.

[Sam Johnson]

I didn’t realize it was possible for a poem to be both overly wordy and stunted and the same time, but example after example make up this volume. While the writing itself was lovely I really felt both a lack of connection and very little to explore beneath the surface. Maybe it just isn’t my type of poetry, but I just didn’t find this enjoyable to read.

[Bill DeGenaro]

So much here to love...a surreal moment becomes a sentimental moment so quickly. Stone's in such control of that constantly changing tone. Recommend. Best collection of poems I've read in years.

[Lisa]

Gorgeous and funny with one step off the planet. She contemplates the hour with lucid tenaciousness. Fresh and thoroughly enjoyable to take in.

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

My introduction to Bianca Stone, which led to me devouring everything else she's written (and drawn). Highly recommended. Octopus Books knows what's up.

[chari!]

4.5

[emma]

“touching the lingering otherness—“

[Jared Wahlgren]

Very good collection! Weakest part for me was the 3rd chapter, Monsieur.

[Abigail Zimmer]

“I drink for the incidental. For the heart of dust…
for this not being known,
rarely knowing
and for the ordinary monstrous knowing I love”

“Where is the rain
when I am feeling this
reckless?”

[santana]

in bianca’s name i pray. amen. *makes the sign of the cross*

[Scribd]

I’ve just started Bianca Stone’s book of poems, and I’m having trouble coming up with the right words to describe it. I started looking for an emblematic quote, but can’t find one; every line is and every line isn’t. The poems vacillate between surrealistic imagery built of mundane minutiae and painfully realistic portraits of relationships in all their absurdity and beauty and pain and joy. She’s judicious and succinct with language but makes every stanza somehow lush, and has a wry sense of humor that permeates each piece. I’ll be spending more time with Someone Else’s Wedding Vows this weekend (strange as that sounds out loud), and maybe after that I’ll have a more concrete sense of these strange and wonderful poems. But maybe not, in which case I’ll continue to savor each line despite my gossamer grasp.

[Jared Duran]

An interesting collection. Playful, skilled use of language and form. Tackles love, family, and sentimentality, well, unsentimentally. Never gets lost in stuffy academic obscurism (though threatens on occasions), deftly avoids taking itself too seriously with the occasional geek-out (there's a Star Trek: Voyager poem). However, this collection suffers from a lack of thematic variety, and some of the most memorable poems/lines are dragged under by sustained periods of even tonality.

[Tom]

Dull, solipsistic, hermetic, and trite.

[Erin Lyndal Martin]

I love a lot of the lines in these poems, and the poems themselves, but I wished for more tightness here as a book.

[Gianni]

I think this is in my top three books of poetry I read this year. My favorite poem is Elegy with Judy Garland and Refrigerator

[Isaiah Hicks]

My least favorite of the Stone works I've read, BUT still very moving in Parts 2, 3, and 4. Wonderful convention of language, as usual, when it comes to her work. I definitely enjoyed it.