Poetry. "Belly is a sequence of confessions. It is a quiet yet intense journey into the deepest wells of a maturing heart. Schreiner writes movingly about the painful transience of love and loss, the forces of memory and childhood, delineated by the revision of seasons and the symbolism of flowers as death, as remembrance. Belly reconciles the permanence of family in all its anguish and grief with the consciousness and inevitability of what supremely makes us human: forgiveness."—Rewa Zeinati "Steven Schreiner reaches his summit in this remarkably vivid, darkly truthful, and often heartbreaking book of memories, losses and longings, the work of experience."—Edward Hirsch