Books
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Edge of the Sea
Creative Nonfiction Chapbook
Available now from CutBank Books
Praise for Edge of the Sea:
"In these sparse, crystalline, and often chilling essays, Allison Field Bell mines the territory of her own body and her mother's body as sites of passion, violence, power, secrets, control, and desire. Keep up, she demands of the reader, exploring intergenerational and cumulative incidents of trauma that pass in so many of our lives as commonplace and go unspoken, unearthing the volatile bonds between a mother and daughter and a girl/woman to her own physical truths amid this gorgeous and terrifying world. An incisive talent to watch."
—Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down
“In these sharp and poetic essays, Field Bell explores the vulnerability of the body with raw honesty. She navigates childhood innocence, mother-daughter dynamics, and the complexities of desire and attraction against lush natural backdrops. Grappling with mental health and the quest for transformative experiences, Field Bell’s voice seeks to articulate the entanglements of shame and longing. These reflections on self-acceptance and the messiness of life invite readers into a profound dialogue about connection and disconnection. A necessary read for anyone in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Field Bell’s work resonates like a modern equivalent of Proust.”
—Puneet Dutt, Poetry Editor, The Fiddlehead and author of The Better Monsters
“Intimate and gripping, Allison Field Bell’s memoir-in-flash unfolds in present tense, through artful use of child’s and young woman’s POV. The themes in these small pieces are large—consent and culpability, rape and attempted rape, alcoholism and an eating disorder, coming out as bisexual, mothers and daughters, the nature of memory itself. Field Bell’s focus is always vivid and precise, her details beautifully chosen. Edge of the Sea is a stunning debut collection.”
—Jacqueline Doyle, author of The Missing Girl
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Without Woman or Body
Poetry Chapbook
Available now from Finishing Line Press
Praise for Without Woman or Body:
“These unflinching poems communicate the physical, emotional and psychic toll of carving out a life as ‘this heavy thing they call woman’, a toll which dogs this speaker wherever she goes, from the Sonoran Desert (‘spikes gone soft in starlight’) to an Israeli kibbutz (‘the worst worry is animal’) to Barcelona (‘Here, you can/ speak. You can read signs, order a glass of wine. /Vino, por favor. You can ask for directions, tell/ men to fuck off.’) Their honesty is searing and staggering.”
—Jacqueline Osherow, author of Divine Ratios
“A poet's heart caught and tangled in a woman's body...Virginia Woolf, as she often does, gets it right. Allison Field Bell's remarkable chapbook is a lyric study of a woman and her body, though its title looks forward to a time when neither will be so important. These poems are entangled with the natural world, from the Negev's date trees to backyard tulips, snow in Indiana to cottonwoods anywhere in the American west. What else but our landscapes are suitable for illuminating not only a woman's body, but our embodiment. The wisest speaker has ‘legs as resilient as cacti/and you can plant them anywhere.’ Field Bell has planted these vivid and astonishing poems in my heart and body, too.”
—Connie Voisine, author of Calle Florista
“From friendship to inebriation, from strings of lovers to lovers with strings, from the most florescent male guppy to the first tulip that breaks through the snow, Without Woman or Body is the branching of female desire. Winter is for dreaming, and come spring, these poems yearn themselves into buds, unfurling, green and hungry for the sun. Allison Field Bell is magnificent, and her poems will ravish you.”
—Lily Hoàng, author of A Bestiary
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All That Blue
Poetry Collection
Available now from Finishing Line Press
Praise for All That Blue:
“You don’t mean /to write poems about bodies (or women)” says the speaker in this edgy collection of taut, chiseled poems, “You just want to write poetry.” But this damaged, determined, fiercely honest speaker can’t seem to write poems about anything else. She’s compelled to make “this heavy thing they call woman” her poems’ subject, along with the desire to “know how to want a body like mine,” the perpetual unease of inhabiting a “body afraid of what it could hold if you let it.” In All That Blue, Allison Field Bell proves again and again, incontrovertibly, that this is very much the stuff of poetry — and exquisite poetry, at that.
–Jacqueline Osherow, author of Divine Ratios
All That Blue cleverly examines the inherent dilemma of trying to exist freely as a woman in a world of gendered roles and violent realities. The varied poems shine as free verse, using intricate form or as prose poetry as well. Allison Field Bell has written a necessary, dynamic debut.
–Jose Hernandez Diaz, author of Bad Mexican, Bad American and The Parachutist.
Allison Field Bell‘s All That Blue is a walk through a landscape where memory and desire intertwine like wildflowers and wind. These poems are artifacts of excavation; they unearth the tender roots of childhood dreams, the tangled paths of mental health, and the evolving definitions of womanhood. Through her careful use of imagery—a guppy-filled jar, a longed-for horse, the stark beauty of the Sonoran Desert— Field Bell makes emotion tangible. This collection does not fear shadows but brings light by offering readers an empathetic voice that resonates long after the page is turned.
–CMarie Fuhrman, author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return
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Stitch
Flash Fiction Chapbook
Forthcoming from Chestnut Review Books
Summer 2026
REVIEWS
Albert Abdul-Barr Wang:
“Allison Field Bell’s recently released chapbook entitled Without Woman or Body reflects not only on autobiographical imagery and metapoetic themes but also on the status of the female body within various states of physical and spiritual liberation, freed from the constraints of the male gaze or social or religious proscriptions.”
Read the full review at The Hooghly Review here
D.E. Hardy:
“Edge of the Sea is a stirring collection of memoir essays by Allison Field Bell that arrests with its honesty and awes with its depth of observation. Field Bell’s candor and poetic soundscape transport us as she translates the slippery substance that is memory into image and scene.”
Read the full review at Claudine here