Francesca Bell's book What Small Sound is gorgeous, raw, and disarmingly honest beginning to end. Her poems encompass the scope of her life, her family's life, plus her generous and empathetic assessment of the larger world. She writes of a struggle to be "normal" in the fiery, broken, unpredictable chaos she sees around her. With skill and passion, she speaks of love, of rape, of deafness, or of holding still for a tarantula, of why she doesn't drink, of who left fingerprints on the bullets of the Las Vegas shooter, or of a mammogram that made her think of the Mars rover. Two quotes of hers from very different poems are unforgettable: "I can't navigate to a life of before / and keep falling face-flat against after." And still: "I want to feel what's next / curled inside me, tight as fists." Read this book. You will keep wanting to find what's after, and you won't forget any of it.
--Susan Terris, author of Familiar Tense

Francesca Bell's poems fish wonder and gratitude and eros from a world brushed by grief and illness and violence. I celebrate this poet's tender commitments to remaining open, especially after loss and even when tragedy triggers an instinct to shelter or retreat. In this way, Bell turns our degrees of separation into songs for contact. The poetic praying found in What Small Sound feels like the grace our moment needs.
--Geffrey Davis, author of Night Angler

"Between grief and relief, Francesca Bell's poems don't pause, they flow -- like a warm bath, and someone quietly bringing a candle; then a cold shower, and the body awakened to spring." --Lúcia Leão, RHINO Poetry

"Many of these poems use wordplay between the title and the themes which are unpacked while reading and rereading each one. The stark contrasts between the topic initially hinted at in the title and what the poem's subject actually is, heightens the tensions between each piece. Those silent spaces act as meditations whispered to the reader, and to the speaker as they both reciprocally ruminate on domestic life and expectations." --Shannon Vare Christine, Caesura Literary

"Francesca Bell (Bright Stain) writes poems that chime like the bell of her own name: bright but resonant, sharp but familiar, lush and likely to echo long after its initial strike. What Small Sound is Bell's second collection, and it brings together a haunting yet beautiful set of poems centered on the losses--or potential for them--that encircle her... Despite these losses, and the fear and heaviness that accompany them, Bell writes poems that insist pain is only one part of every story." --Sara Beth West, Shelf Awareness

Ultimately, What Small Sound entreats us to value the terror, sorrow, and hardship in life as much as its moments of beauty and love and sensuousness. As readers, the poet's appeal to us is easier to accept, and makes more sense because she leads by example: "Oh world," Bell sings plaintively in "After the Hearing Test," "leave me slowly. / Let me dally over each diminishing return." -- Sarah Kain Gutowski, Colorado State University Center for Literary Publishing

"What Small Sound... is an exploration of life, death, and love, and of the myriad ways these essential elements of human existence intersect and define each other... These poems seek to bring all that's lost and unspoken into the light, so that we might connect with it, with the world, and, maybe, in brief and unexpected moments, with each other." --Vivian Wagner, Pedestal Magazine

"Powerful and full of emotion, with themes that will engage readers from many different audiences." --Sarah Michaelis, Library Journal