Synopses & Reviews
"Nostalgic"
Jar of feathers becoming,
finally, another map:
cloistered homage to a decade of geese
haunting the grid of our
steadfastness.
Un-find the coveted
ibis; kiss the scarlet of the robin's
blurred departure.
In the end, we were landmark,
compass, same as the lingered-over
pond, the marsh
where cattails remained when all else
left. Ragged in salt,
cloud-headed.
Paula Bohince's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, and Poetry. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt Trust, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship.
Review
"There's movement in Bohince's poems, but it's gradual and subtlean eye passing like Ken Burns' camera over a still image, discovering new details. Even in narrative passages, Bohince lets participles do the work of predicates.... 'The Peacock,' about a depressed father who seems destined to leave his young family, mixes sentences and fragments to painterly effect."
The New York Times
Paula Bohince looks back at natures enduring and defining cycles in her new collection, The Children, finally concluding In the end, we were landmark,/ compass.”
Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Pre-pub Alert
The plosive thrills and quietly mournful tenor of the finely-wrought poems in Paula Bohinces The Children reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads.... [A] masterful command of syntax and line.”
Virginia Konchan, The Rumpus
This is a poet whose work I want to keep reading.”
Rebecca Morgan Frank, Memorious
Aptly titled, The Children illuminates a kind of contemporary nostalgia, one the pursues an innocence found only in childhood without forsaking the beautiful complexities of aging and the natural evolution of the wildlife around us: Virus in my heart. Branches / salted with buds, soft- / eyed on a sill.”
Kelly Forsythe, The Los Angeles Review
These verses conjure rural southwest Pennsylvania as an exotic locale, swirled with pussy willow, milkweed, hornet nests of gray papier-mâché, velvet-antlered deer, mushrooms like men on horseback, flusters of quail flushed from briar. . . . We are drawn into an interior network that at its best sets off Plath-like, compressed-energy depth charges of imagery.”
Mike Schneider, Pittsburgh City Paper
Synopsis
Poems of a lived-in landscape, where beauty is the afterimage of loss, and grief is staunched by the changing seasons.
About the Author
Paula Bohinces first collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, received Sarabande Books inaugural Aleda Shirley Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The Hudson Review, Slate, and The Yale Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt Trust, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, in addition to the 2010-2011 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. She lives in Pennsylvania.