Paula Bohince

A reckoning with psychological and ecological crises from a poet whose work has been praised as “beautiful and riveting” (Los Angeles Review of Books)A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince’s mesmerizing new collection, A Violence, is written at inflection points: a waking from dissociation borne from a harrowing childhood; a breakdown; and a struggle toward wholeness by means of mystified recollection amid ecological disturbances. Praised for poems that “reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads” (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image “rushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.” Contemplating vulnerability and resilience in the entwined human and natural worlds, with a voice precise and powerful, A Violence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self “gone away,” where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.

A reckoning with psychological and ecological crises from a poet whose work has been praised as “beautiful and riveting” (Los Angeles Review of Books)A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince’s mesmerizing new collection, A Violence, is written at inflection points: a waking from dissociation borne from a harrowing childhood; a breakdown; and a struggle toward wholeness by means of mystified recollection amid ecological disturbances. Praised for poems that “reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads” (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image “rushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.” Contemplating vulnerability and resilience in the entwined human and natural worlds, with a voice precise and powerful, A Violence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self “gone away,” where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.

“A Meteor of Intelligent Substance”“Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is”"Invaluable""Liberties is THE place to be. Change starts in the mind.” Liberties, a journal of Culture and Politics, is essential reading for those engaged in the cultural and political issues and causes of our time. Liberties features serious, independent, stylish, and controversial essays by significant writers and leaders throughout the world; new poetry; and, introduces the next generation of writers and voices to inspire and impact the intellectual and creative lifeblood of today’s culture and politics. In this issue of Liberties: Cass R. Sunstein - The Supreme Court Gone Wrong; Carissa Veliz - Digitization is Surveillance; Ekaterina Pravilova - The Autocrat’s War; Richard Taruskin - What is Bad Taste; Jonathan Zimmerman - Memoirs of a White Savior; Richard Wolin - The Cult of Carl Schmitt; Mark Polizzotti - Surrealism and Cancellation; Andrew Butterfield - Dante During Covid; Scott Spillman - The Strange History of the Slave Songs; Leora Batnitzky - The Sacrifice of Edith Stein; Helen Vendler - Sylvia Plath on Motherhood; Jared Marcel Pollen - Was Havel Right?; Celeste Marcus - The Curse of the Radical Israeli Right; Leon Wieseltier - The Future of Nature; and new poems by Claire Malroux, Marissa Grunes, Paula Bohince.

Seated one, loved by the lavishing comband fingers of another woman demon-strating how attention and technique coalesceinto art. Where to gowhen the mother is gone. All occupations form to replace her. What relief to be a girl again for an hour,beneath the practiced wrists of her avatar. Paula Bohince is the author of The Children and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Poetry, Granta, the Nation, and elsewhere.

"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.

“[Paula] Bohince is more naturalist than romantic, meaning that her poems above all honor their dark side, their realism, their edge.”—Stanley Plumly Spanning decades and set on a decrepit farm, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods begins with a speaker invoking her dead father. As details are gradually uncovered, we learn the father was murdered by a trusted laborer. Paula Bohince has received a “Discovery”/The Nation Award in 2007, the Grolier Poetry Prize, and grants from the Puffin and the Ludwig Vogelstein foundations. In 2008, Bohince will be the Amy Clampitt Resident Fellow in Massachusetts. She lives in Pennsylvania.