Dan Bellm honors the practice of counting: counting time down, counting time forward. And he engages his readers in the practice of marking our moments, and our moment, with unaccountable grace. - Forrest Hamer

Balam Rodrigo’s book is a retelling of Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, but remixed to show us that the colonial machinery is still very much at work in the “fertile burying ground called Mexico.” With Dan Bellm’s brilliant translation, the book becomes the very country where these atrocities take place. - Javier Zamora

“Newly born from death,” these voices, these bodies, refuse to vanish from the face of the earth. Each voice is haunting, inerasable. Dan Bellm’s translations are as intimate as whispered conversations around a kitchen table. Balam Rodrigo’s poetic gifts are mind-blowing: in this singular book, they ignite into a blazing chorus. - Eduardo C. Corral

This book will haunt you, as well it should. - Rosa Alcalá

A book as daring as the migrants who undertake the perilous journey north. - Roberto Lovato

Dan Bellm's Deep Well is a breathtaking, constantly astonishing elegiac sequence of poems in honor of his mother. Reflecting upon both the power of her presence in his life and the deepening grief of watching her passage through Alzheimer's, Dan Bellm both celebrates the fierce integrity of this remarkable woman and quietly charts his own poetics of loss. These lyrics of memoriam and these deep songs (in Lorca's sense) of mourning seem almost to etch themselves onto the air. Keep this book at hand; hold its passages close. This is an essential collection of poetry. - David St. John

The polished stones of the stanza—all unrhymed tercets, haiku-like syllables of 5/7/5, with language pure as a meditation bell—are Bellm’s useful masonry for contemplating a subject both fathomless and keenly felt: the loss and the life of his mother. All of Bellm’s poems are poignant for their particulars; they are also containers for a larger truth that any grown child comes to know. We were once one with our mothers, and some part of them will always be unknowable to us. - Jen Hinst-White, Image

Reading Dan Bellm's poems, I think: This is blessing … I am in awe of how Bellm's poems perform a dance with and against Holy Scripture. Practice is like a long prayer of wonder, gratitude, pain and loss and tenderness. - Alicia Ostriker

Something happened to Dan Bellm in this third book that I believe will propel him most deservingly as one of the foremost poets of his generation. Here, speaking the language of the prophets, revising it in a way that is both humble and heartbreakingly playful … Bellm achieves a quiet grandeur that casts a spell and does not let me be. I love Practice as a book-long sequence of parables, prayers, elegies, and incantations that are traditional and yet utterly contemporary. In assembling this formal collection, Bellm teaches us: We are living in Biblical times. - Ilya Kaminsky