The Bella Vista: Poems

Emma Ruth Rundle

"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.

Praise for The Bella Vista

“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

“Emma Ruth Rundle’s The Bella Vista is more than a poetry collection—it’s a memoir charted by stars, an autobiographical scrapbook and lyrical compass that helps us navigate our everyday lives through its wisdom, beauty, and fingerprint specificity.” —Brandon Stosuy, author of Sad Happens and the Make Time for Creativity series

“Emma Ruth Rundle’s debut collection of poems, The Bella Vista, is a gorgeous, fierce, and devastating account of romantic love. Rundle has found a new form for her prodigious lyrical gifts; here is a lucid and haunting collection that moves with a kind of dream logic to ‘summon the unseen.’”  —Deborah Landau, author of Skeletons and Soft Targets

“In her music, in her art, and now in her debut poetry collection, Emma Ruth Rundle never shies away from that which is uncomfortable, unknowable, and broken. Within the realms she reigns over, dawn breaks, hope dies, and love lies bleeding out, its scarlet tendrils coloring riffs and written lines alike. Swim into the deep, dark waters of The Bella Vista at your own risk.” —Kim Kelly, labor and music journalist, and author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor

“Immersive and wonderfully visceral… Everything Emma Ruth Rundle sings sounds like a warning.” —The New York Times

“Emma Ruth Rundle's voice will pierce your chest and keep on going.” —NPR

“As far as dark singer/songwriters go, Rundle is one of her generation's best.” —Brooklyn Vegan