A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet

"Laura Isabela Amsel's Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet explores the personal sting of a difficult father, breast cancer, and an unexpected divorce, as well as the more general sting of habitat loss and climate change, yet the sweet remains-horses and birds and flowers survive the squeeze of suburban development, and the poet's own travels and memories of travel begin to open the present up to new possibilities. Amsel distinguishes herself by her linguistic exuberance and craft, her risk-taking and her ear for nuance, for cadence and resonance. The poems in Brief Campaign achieve a complex and formal-if grief-shadowed-beauty."

-Jon Davis, founder of the Institute of American Indian Arts' MFA Program and author of fourteen poetry collections, including Above the Bejeweled City and Fearless Now and Nameless

"Laura Isabela Amsel's beautiful poems tap emotion like spiles in maple trunks. She knows the natural world like few do, shares her loot with us wing flutter by quiet slither before the inevitable bite. Her imagery transports the reader to a place one might only have in muscle memory. Amsel reminds us that we are all part of something larger and more layered than our self-made human boxes. An extraordinary collection worthy of rereading time and again."

-Amanda Boyden, author of the international bestselling novels Pretty Little Dirty, Babylon Rolling, and the memoir I Got the Dog

"In A Brief Campaign of Sting and Sweet, 'seeing sharpens / into sudden spectacle.' Laura Isabela Amsel's intrepid debut collection forages the open country of the heart, plucking out, in Auden's phrase, 'the images...that hurt and connect.' Here are poems that, 'hum in [the] mouth's hive'; that pulse with ecological attention; that search, sear, sting, supply the balm, and stitch open wounds into song. With this compelling book, Amsel claims her place as a poet in full possession of her gift."


-Michael Pickard, Ph.D., Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Literature, Millsaps College