A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince鈥檚 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 鈥渞eward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads鈥� (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image 鈥渞ushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.鈥� 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 鈥済one away,鈥� where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.
Awards and Recognition
- Finalist for the Foreword INDIES, Poetry Category
Paula Bohince is the author of three previous poetry collections, Swallows and Waves, The Children, and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of 快色直播, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.
"Traumatic grief, political tyranny, and environmental catastrophe are not irreversible. In A Violence, Bohince uses her imagination to repel that which seeks to destroy us. Her poems are switchblades of beauty, parrying and counter-attacking at once."鈥擬ichael Londra, The Arts Fuse
"The music of these poems, the ineffable tension between sound and sense, makes them immediately haunting. You’ll want to speak them aloud to yourself as you take your time absorbing them. Soon, their layers begin to unfold. . . . There’s always more to extract from these complex, lyrical poems. . . . A Violence is poetry at its magical best."鈥擜manda Holmes Duffy, Washington Independent Review of 快色直播
“With a fiercely observant eye, and with disarming, wide-awake music, Paula Bohince considers what's to be made of all that's been diminished. Negotiating the aching beauty and fragile persistence of a damaged world, A Violence is ecstatic, woeful, and gorgeous.”—Mark Doty, National Book Award–winning author of Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
“Paula Bohince's poems—urgent, melodious, and always surprising—articulate the known world in lines of stunning clarity. A book for every reader interested in the achievements of poetry today.”—Cynthia Zarin, author of Next Day: New and Selected Poems
“Paula Bohince writes with an urgency born of a struggle for wholeness of self and, by extension, of the world around her. She remembers sadness early on when she was ‘a child in the eye of a blizzard,’ centerless and in danger, fearful of her life. All of this she transforms, miraculously, into metaphors, exact and worldly, in her celebration of living things, lattices alive with carnations, the fugitive colors of spring—or otherworldly, such as ‘the wanderings among stars, those leaps / that mean everything.’ Her faith in language to redeem sorrow becomes our faith. Reading her is to look upward in praise.”—Grace Schulman, author of Again, the Dawn: New and Selected Poems, 1976–2022
