Someone Else's Wedding Vows

Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.

Heavily influenced by a family of writers and artists, including the late poet Ruth Stone, Bianca Stone began writing poems at a very early age. Born in Vermont, and raised by a single mother along with her twin brother and older sister, she studied poetry and literature at Antioch College, and received her MFA in poetry from NYU’s Creative Writing Program in 2009. Also a visual artist, Bianca Stone began combining her poetry and art, cultivating the hybrid genre of Poetry Comics. It was from this interest in the visual and lyrical that she began a collaborative project with the poet and essayist, Anne Carson, (who had been her professor at NYU) on the book Antigonick, published by New Directions in 2012. She now works as a personal assistant, as well as a visual artist and poet, and edits a small press, Monk Books, with her partner, Ben Pease, in Brooklyn, NY.