Winner of the 2015 AWP Donald Hall ​Prize in Poetry
2016 Florida Book Award Bronze Medal for Poetry
2017 Milt Kessler Poetry Award Finalist

Hour of the Ox received the 2016 Florida Book Awards bronze medal and the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, selected by Crystal Ann Williams, who called it “a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender.”

​Cancio-Bello examines the multiplicity of distance, wanderlust, and grief at the intersection between filial and cultural responsibility. Desires are sloughed off, replaced by new ones, re-cultivated as mythos. These poems offer a complex and necessary new perspective on the elegiac immigrant song.
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Pitt Poetry Series  |  64 pages  |  ISBN: 978-0822964216

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Praise for Hour of the Ox

"Hour of the Ox is a timeless collection written by a poet of exceptional talent and grace, a voice as tough as it is tender. Poignant and beautifully composed, these elegies hum with emotional potency and moved me beyond measure. This immigrant story emerges through the hands, mouths, hearts, mournings, and voices of a family an ocean away and is exquisite, lyrical, and an incredible and rare gift. And then there is the brother who gently haunts this book and who will haunt readers, for just as we walk with our dead, so too does this brother with his sister, who lovingly illuminates his memory. I wanted to read these poems again and again. They have created shadows that this reader continues to carry, explore—and savor."
                                                                                                                                  —Crystal Ann Williams, contest judge, author of Detroit as Barn


​“A striking and rare combination of spare precision and rich details, Hour of the Ox tells a quiet, yet grand and universal tale of place and displacement, loss and renewal, illusion and disillusion. This is one of the most compelling books of poetry I’ve read in years, not simply because of its seamless craft, but more so because of its pure and urgent voice possessed by that ineffable quality that makes poetry, poetry.”
                                                                                                                                  —Richard Blanco, Presidential Inaugural Poet, author of Looking for The Gulf Motel


​“Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello’s powerful debut introduces us to a world where the modern elegy sings across ocean and bone, and where it’s possible ‘storms fanned from the ears of elephants.’ This magnificent book is ‘not a love song, nor a glossary of despair,’ but rather wholly enchanting and original, bearing the beauties and failures of the body and all of ‘what the sea asks us to return.’”
                                                                                                                                  —Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of Oceanic