"In The Bella Vista Emma Ruth Rundle's sinuous lyric moves deftly between moods, syntax firing across synapses of image and sound, illuminating the pulverizing at-once-ness of daily living, loving, in the new world." --Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr! and Pilgrim Bell

"rip up this book, my love

i wrote it for you"

With The Bella Vista, Emma Ruth Rundle turns to language as the best and perhaps only tool suitable to express, in her words, "the tenderness and brutality of romantic love."

Written on the road and in the air between tour locations, the chronological, self-referential poems of The Bella Vista follow a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution; culminating, eventually, with a sort of peace.

The collection is a concept album, an addiction memoir, a family tree, and a love letter all at once--to music, mistakes, and womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.