The Bella Vista: Poems

For twenty years, Emma has pursued music as her primary medium, evoking dreamy abstraction, exploring textural maximalism, and embracing her own vulnerability with a guitar, a piano, and the sound of her voice. With The Bella Vista, she 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 follows a relationship from its enthralling genesis through its twisted convulsions and the devastation of its dissolution then, eventually, to 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, to mistakes, to womanhood; to cross-country drives and other artists and the long road to finding oneself.