Winner of the 2021 Digging Press Chapbook Series Award. Marie Baléo's poems articulate dignity, admiration, and a profound kinship for Beirut, Lebanon. On September 1st, 2003, Baléo'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, Baleo'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. The Digging Press Chapbook Series features pocket-sized books, perfect-bound with square spines, original cover art, and layout design. Cover, illustrations, layout, and book design by Cynthia Alvarez. Photography by Marie Baléo.
Praise for Marie Baléo's Submersion
"[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 there is a cost for living in, and loving, a particular place and its particular people, and often the 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
