Winner of the Digging Press Fall 2020 Chapbook Contest
Winner of the Poetry International 2020 Fall Chapbook Contest
Long-listed for the the PANK Book Contest 2020
Semi-Finalist in the Beloit Poetry Journal Chad Walsh Chapbook Contest
Includes Peregrines, commended in the Poetry Society’s 2020 National Poetry Competition
“Marie Baléo's Submersion honors a Lebanon of cultural and historical complexity with poems that move deliberately and poignantly between narrative and lyric, political and personal, fact and feeling. In poems that explore her adolescence in Beirut and her family's exodus from the country, Baléo bears witness to the deep and difficult wound created by political unrest: "that smoking crater / where a street used to be, a cupped hand held / out for the ashes of men's bodies."
Together, her poems are a necessary and moving lesson in grace. They remind us that there is a cost for living in, and loving, a particular place and its particular people, and that often that cost is meted out in memories and dreams that linger long after we've left. "There is a certain something / that will not be silenced / or bludgeoned," she writes. "No matter / how hard we try."”
— Sarah Kain Gutowski, author of Fabulous Beast: Poems
“Time is not linear, and what is lost is always with us. In Submersion, Baléo builds “cathedrals for our loss” and we must look because “anywhere there is humanness, / a massacre may occur.” These poems are a careful study of the power of place to absorb us in abundant detail. “There are dunes / in the basement…They make a cradle / for the lace skulls of stray cats”. Cinematic, the collection pulls us forward and back in time until we acknowledge that “the end of the world / is not surreal; it is achingly real.””
— Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass are There to Dig a Moat
“Marie Baléo's poems articulate dignity, admiration, and a profound kinship for Beirut, Lebanon. On September 1st, 2003, Baleo's family moved to this vibrant city for work. Submersion is a subtle love letter exquisitely expressed in lyrical and narrative verse. Experiencing this new country while coming of age, Baléo's poetry bears witness to the tug-of-war between peaceful and loving daily life and the weight of the country's history of civil strife.”
— Gessy Alvarez, Founding Editor, Digging Press
“Marie Baléo’s poems speak lyrically in Submersion about a young girl’s exile from Lebanon, and the experience of her restless passage and initiation into a larger world. It is a threnody of remembrance.”
— Sandra Alcosser, Editor-in-Chief, Poetry International
[About Peregrines] “We loved this poem for its cinematic rendition of war and conflict that plays out on large and intimate scales. It operates as personal testament and through an admirable poetics of witness. The poet’s assured handling of detail and metaphor lift it, as a peregrine, to heights of lyric intensity and emotional power.”