Kyce Bello

Far Country

Out March 4th!

“The poems in Far Country exist both in our material world and in a world entirely beyond. Steeped in cricket songs, this collection is a meditation on climate, futures, legacy, and the land beneath our feet when we stop and take a moment to notice the wide sky. Far Country is a gorgeous follow-up to one of my favorite poetry collections by one of my favorite poets.”
—Jake Skeets, author of Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

About Far Country

In her second collection of poems, Kyce Bello attempts to explore the unknowable—a landscape transformed by climate change, motherhood turned into crucible, the veils fluttering between the living and dead.

The poems in Far Country document a journey through an un-mapped territory in which loss—of the beloved earth, of a struggling daughter, of certainty and ease— becomes a medium for deepening connection and love.

The book unfolds like a journey through un-mapped territory, with stops in the underworld, the burning “known” world, and inner and outer landscapes transformed by drought and death.

These poems are a reckoning with change and loss. In one poem, “The Bend,” a woman asks, “How do we survive this?” “Far Country” is not an answer, but a witnessing, an embrace, and a celebration that becomes its own act of resilience and transformation.

Order from your local indie bookstore (Bookshop makes it easy), or, if mail ordering, from Eighth Day Books.

Praise for Far Country

“These are poems saturated in feeling, shimmering with startling imagery, simultaneously clear and mysterious, patient in their stalking of silence and music. Like a night-blooming fragrance, these poems bring me closer to the medicine of earth and to dreamtime.”
—Anne Haven McDonnell, author of Breath on a Coal and Living with Wolves

“Far County’s precise lyrical beauty, with its images of place and lived experiences, is a delight to read. Bello’s writing captures the landscape of northern New Mexico with keen depth and care. Her poems are kaleidoscopic observations that gently and effectively uncover larger truths and terrors. Bello invites readers into a world of multiple realities with her engaging dynamism.”
—Laura Da’, Eastern Shawnee poet, author of Instruments of True Measure: Poems, poet laureate of Redmond, Washington

“In Far Country, eco-grief is the canvas upon which the poet paints the trauma of transformation. These poems meet the edge of both abyss and evolution as each new unfathomable world is born. Bello’s work holds up this hope to us: that we were made for this.”
—David Anthony Martin, author of Bijoux and The Ground Nest 

“In her poignant and compelling second poetry collection, Kyce Bello explores “what lies, /curled, inside the shells of the dead.” Writing grief, the poet traces its sinuous paths, like the sinews necessary to articulate bones toward mourning. These paths snake through the New Mexican landscape, that Bello enunciates with the precision of “knots on a prayer rope” and incantates with poetic vision toward healing and the molting into new beginnings. The writing in Far Country is imperative and unyielding, like hunger and thirst, like the revolutions of life, light, stars, and the seasons. A breathtaking collection. “
––Beatrice Szymkowiak, author of B/RDS

Refugia

“Strange how hard it is to speak to the future, to leave a / paper trail.” But this is what Kyce Bello’s Refugia does. These are poems of blooming and burning, poems of growth and decay, poems that still see beauty in a broken world. Bello is a poet to watch, and Refugia is a book we need in this moment.”

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Winner of the inaugural Interim 2018 Test Site Poetry Series Prize, Refugia is a bright and hopeful voice in the current conversation about climate change.

Kyce Bello’s debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to “something other and unknown / growing beyond us.” Ultimately an exploration of resilience, Refugia brings to life the author’s home ground in Northern New Mexico and carefully observes the seasons in parallel with inter-generational cycles of renewal and loss.

These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees—be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.

Like any wilderness, Refugia creates a terrain that is grounded in image and yet many-layered and complex. These poems write us back into an ecological language of place and underscore our most critical tool for survival: imagination.

Available from University of Nevada Press and IndieBound

Reviews

Ploughshares

World Literature Today

EcoTheo Review

Foreword Review

Publisher’s Weekly

“The poems of Refugia confer upon its readers the injunction to join with inquiry time and time again, as in the lines: “If we perish — I meant to say persist — / do we arise and turn / with the wind?” and its readers must. Bello’s poetics do not coddle. There’s no time for such. What is left of the world we are given. What Refugia makes of it we must pass on to our children, and survive all else to survive for.”

—Joan Naviyuk Kane, 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Bunting Fellow

“Kyce Bello’s haunting Refugia is both homage and lament for the Earth we share.  Kinder than Robinson Jeffers, Bello extends her sympathy also to the transience of human existence wherein we are all, ultimately, refugees. The equanimity of Bello’s vision is direly needed in the ongoing environmental crises of our world. I’m thankful to find a poet in the 21st century with such compassion.”

—Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at UNLV

“Kyce Bello elegantly braids together a focus on daily concerns—with an emphasis on family dynamics, particularly motherhood—with environmental concerns, as she grapples with the gifts and burdens of living in the Anthropocene… Bello’s ability to hold joy and despair in the heart at once is remarkable; her concern for drought, for lost conifers, for the world her children will inhabit and inherit shines in these poems.”

—Amie Whittemore, author of Glass Harvest

About the Cover: Detail of Wilderness #2 2018, acrylic and oil on canvas, 48″ x 36″ by Aaron Morse. Used with permission of the artist.

A Certified Clinical Herbalist and Registered Nurse, Kyce Bello holds an interdisciplinary degree in Southwest Studies and Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico.

She earned an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts, which she attended as a non-Native student of Cuban and Puerto Rican descent.

Kyce’s debut poetry collection, Refugia, winner of Interim’s Test Site Poetry Series, was published in September, 2019 by University of Nevada Press. It received a New Mexico/Arizona Book Award in 2020.

Her second poetry collection, Far Country, was released in March, 2025 by University of Nevada Press.

Along with her husband, she raises two daughters in a Santa Fe. They live beneath a very large apple tree, a stone’s throw from an occasional river.

You can follow her life as a poet, mother, and citizen at Old Recipe For a New World.

Please drop me a line: kycebello at gmail.com