"Stone's poems astutely and honestly address the longing and cost of human connections ." -- Publishers Weekly "The poems in Someone Else's Wedding Vows are vibrant with a voice that sees the world from every angle . Entire poems down to individual lines challenge the way we see relationships, whether with another person or ourselves, leaping from the mundane co-existence of daily life to the wilder possibilities of imagination." -- NewPages "In Someone Else's Wedding Vows Bianca Stone offers us an invitation to venture simultaneously inward on a journey of self-excavation, and outward where our journeys can intersect through empathy, imagination, and inquiry ." -- Front Porch "Bianca Stone's poems are powerful, moving, and original . There is an amazing image center in her brain! Her brain (psyche, heart) can wrestle the matter of life to the ground (a pleasure for matter), and shapechange with it, and it does not give up its ghost but reveals, in joy and sorrow, its spirit. Stone's poems are highly charged, lively, and interesting. They are fiercely anti-sentimental, and emotionally generous .
They have a distinctive underlying grieving compassion. I see in her work the natural weirdness and leaping of our minds. But wilder! It's as if she can take her mind out of gear, out of its prosaic limitations, and overhear, and sing, the strange true thoughts and feelings we have when we're at our most genuine and unprotected. In her poems we're in the presence of a naked human voice , not concealing itself--or over-reaching to expose itself--which dives as deep as voices go." --Sharon Olds, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of Stag's Leap "Let's say hypersensitivity ranks high up among poetry's necessary attributes. Let's say that to ride the back of a parable and make it past the bell rates further fervent notice, and let's say we want to pay attention to a poet who says we will perceive our own pain in others/and we will know if we are capable of loving them. Open the book, read this poem: ‘Reading a Science Article on the Airplane to JFK,' and then I'm confident you'll want to spend a lot of time with Bianca Stone's astonishing debut book ." --Dara Wier, author of Remnants of Hannah "I read the work of our most brilliant young poets to be reminded that it is still possible, despite everything, for our abused and decimated language to ring out the difficult truths of full-on awareness.
The best of them, like Bianca Stone, do not settle for mere cleverness . They know it is not enough to be brilliant, that it is essential in poetry not merely to report the miseries and blessings, but to transform them. When she says, ‘I saw the devil with his stitching techniques/textiles and shadow/saw his hands that never stopped' or ‘I found a small notebook called The People of Distress,' I really believe her, and believe she is going to the difficult places and writing these poems in service not just to herself, but to us all, so that we can go to them and together find a little hope." --Matthew Zapruder, author of Come on All You Ghosts "Bianca Stone's poetry has the glow of 21st-century enlightenment and lyric possession. Hilarious and powerful , Someone Else's Wedding Vows will have you come to terms with the vehemence of her magic." --Major Jackson, author of Holding Company.