POETRY
TEMPER
A book about where I come from.
“Restraint and abandon ride side-by-side through these fiercely distilled poems-again and again they bear reluctant witness to the shadows hovering around the edges of every moment. Temper starts with an evocation of a mystery-an empty train station, the words of a last phone call, a sister’s body beside the tracks. Move closer. I want to tell you a story, the poet murmurs alluringly, as if to implicate us in the crime. A beautiful unease suffuses these poems-they make me aware I’m alive, and certain of nothing. A stunning debut.” – Nick Flynn
DO NOT RISE
A book about war, memory and PTSD.
“The collection’s conceptual center—and its most insistent word—is “open.” The poems have a stripped-down, investigatory drive. Everything “wants out,” and this outward pressure moves the work into a series of shifts, cuts, turns, magnetic pulls. Water on the tongue disappears into snow, snow gives way to a lake. It is as if we could witness the decomposition and refiguring of the world within the decomposition and refiguring of the line. We feel the poems pushing against grammar and logic and into phenomena. Words and phrases break into “fire,” into “splinters,” into “fragments.” At times it is as if we are watching a chemical reaction reset to the rhythm of human perception. The resulting gaps open the poem to a meaningful range of pauses, hesitations, delays, sonic mutations, reconsiderations. A lapse of one thing makes possible another. A slowing down of time within the poem allows us to enter the folds of its thought. There is so much seeing in its listening. ”The flaw is always / breaking away” Always. . . away. Discoveries lie on the verge of departure.” – Elizabeth Willis
CEASE
A book about peace.
“First comes peace then comes after…” It’s a sober utterance that hurls us into this monumental new collection, the pearl of calm on the storm’s tongue. The effect is astonishing. Bachmann manages to strike a perfect balance between crystalline clarity and centripetal verve, building poems that wild inside walls made of water, water made of motion, motion made of air. Bachmann has given us new territory, this major new event.” – Kaveh Akbar
