(Cover art by Katherine Stott Buxton)
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"John Keats was right. This is a vale of soul making. No recent book of poems I know proves that hard, beautiful grace more than Laura Stott’s The Bear’s Mouth. These wise, elegantly feral, often breath-takingly intimate poems trace the making of their magnificent poet’s soul, from among the deepest griefs a person can know—the loss of a baby—to some of this life’s greatest joys—finding creaturely comfort and home in the natural world and parenting with enduring wonder and fiercely selfless adoration. Like Keats, Stott shows us the way through the vale and travels with us. - Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island 

“When I lie down at night / I have dreams that take me deep / into the mountains/ where an animal waits in the dark space / under a tree”: the world of TheBear’s Mouth is fabular and real, dream and waking, a book of tales and a naturalist’s notebook, a bestiary and a songbook,and in these doublings, we can feel our own multiplicities, the dark fossil layers of our lives. Grief and wonder go hand in hand, surfacing like the immense body of a whale, then diving again. The speaker of these poems feels the teeth of the bear on her skull as she asks: Do you have her? She has the courage to ask harrowing questions, and to listen to the answers, so that we can hear these devastating songs of loss and recovery. - LisaBickmore, Utah Poet Laureate

"In these poems by Laura Stott, the poet releases the blue figures from the canvases, pages of Matisse, lets that color of spirit slip into new spaces, the efficacy of art entering language, playing with school children, with Alaskan whales, traveling through Los Angeles neighborhoods and the island in the Great Salt Lake, a trembling blue, a blue of spirit, a beauty pouring through the everyday. - Joel Long

"By means of exceptionally concrete and direct language, Laura Stott's poems lift dark matter up out of the shared unknown and give it shape. They have the simplicity of blue shadows and bells, the curiously beautiful postures of shore birds in a marsh. This book is as clear-eyed and original as any poetry I have read, and the poems do not melt away as you read them, they stay, they keep on reminding that mystery inheres not in abstract complexities but in our essential experience of the world. A truly wonderful debut volume."— Christopher Howell