Fossils in the Making

Review of Fossils in Sage Cigarettes

By admin in Book Review, Fossils in the Making

Grateful for Jillian A Fantin’s astute review of Fossils in Sage Cigarettes Magazine. Fantin writes:

By the end, we discover Kristin George Bagdanov’s collection is one rife with dualities: scientific and lyric, objective and subjective, individual and collective. Though these aforementioned dualities initially appear paradoxical in nature, Bagdanov subverts her reader’s expectations by combining these dualities within her particularly crafted forms. In doing so, she explores individual and collective bodies and our current ecological epoch through the lens of an intimate speaker.

Read the rest here.

Review of Fossils in Poetry Flash

By admin in Book Review, Fossils in the Making

Poetry Flash published a review of Fossils in the Making in January 2022, though it’s only just come to my attention (hence, the delayed post!). Rosalinda Monroy writes:

Fossils in the Making is an account of our failure to come to terms with our bodies as both a thing of beauty and a thing of destruction. The discordance we experience upon realizing that our bodies have the capacity to consume, pollute, exploit and destroy so many other bodies, while also having the capacity to feel sadness, desire, awe, and even love for those same bodies, is an idea the speaker grapples with repeatedly in this text.

–“Measuring Crisis,” Monroy.

Read the rest here.

Interview + Review of Fossils

By admin in Book Review, broadside, Fossils in the Making, interview

Several years ago I had the pleasure of participating in the “broadsides on the bus” public art exhibit in Moscow, Idaho, during which a local artist made a broadside of one of my poems that then adorned the public buses for some time.

The press that orchestrates these visual / textual collaborations, Broadsided Press, has reviewed the book in which that poem later appeared–Fossils in the Making–and asked me some questions about my poetry:

Kristin George Bagdanov’s Fossils in the Making reminds me that, at their best, poetry and science are inherently inseparate pursuits. In the tradition of many contemporary poets and their predecessors trying to make sense of living in, looking at, and loving a world that’s also semi-constantly on the verge (or in the midst) of its own unmaking, Fossils offers poems that meditate and meander, that question and sing. This is a book that looks hard at this world in all its complications and somehow lands on something that doesn’t feel quite cynical—there’s joy in these pages, as well as real, difficult reckoning. I’m saying I loved it: I will try to say why.

Read the full interview and review by Joely Fitch here.

Carolina Quarterly: Review of Fossils in the Making

By admin in Book Review, Fossils in the Making, literary journals Tags: , ,

A new review of Fossils in the Making written by Tegan Daly appears in the Winter 2021 print version of The Carolina Quarterly. You can also read it online here.

“The final section, “Remains,” ranges back out from the interiority of “Wagers” to a sort of cataloging of conclusions drawn from earlier ideas. The poems of this section vary greatly in structure, but seem to hold a somewhat cohesive voice. There is a resignation to this section. If earlier poems served as the forming of a hypothesis, “Remains” is the dire findings of the research. The section explores the ecological disasters of our own making with an eerie matter-of-factness.“

double feature: review of fossils and diurne

By admin in Book Review, Diurne, Fossils in the Making Tags: ,

Dayna Patterson reads Fossils in the Making and Diurne together for Sugar House Review:

“In both Fossils in the Making and Diurne, I’m in awe of Bagdanov’s recursiveness, how lines and phrases from poems echo within individual poems, but also across (and even between) the manuscripts, lending both books an almost dream-making, trance-like quality”

Read the full review here.

Review of Fossils

By admin in Book Review, Fossils in the Making

New review of Fossils in the Making up at Dispatches from the Poetry Wars as part of their Poetics for the More Than Human World special issue:

“In her debut poetry collection, Kristin George Bagdanov explores the recursive processes through which beings become something new through creative interactions with other selves, bodies, languages, and worlds. These processes contain echoes of the past, the present, and the future, making fossils a fitting image to guide this collection’s blend of scientific and poetic methods of inquiry, as they are entangled with geologic pasts and our extractive present as well as a future in flux that shifts with our every entanglement with the world we live in.“

–Benjamin Platt

Read the rest here, and the whole issue here.

MOUTHFUL OF FLESH: review of fossils in the making

By admin in Book Review, Books, Fossils in the Making, Uncategorized

New review of Fossils is up at Ecotheo:

the poems function at the height of their powers in a space where direct visceral experience of the page bypasses the barriers of rational exegesis. For all their intellectual demands, ultimately these poems ask you to interact with them deeply as physical, tangible things, as real as a stone trilobite in your hand.  

–Dina Strasser

Read the rest here.

Largehearted Boy: Book Notes Play List

By admin in blog posts, Fossils in the Making

I made a playlist for Fossils in the Making! Listen and read more about it at Largehearted Boy. 

My poetry is grounded in music. I do not consider sense to be more important than sound in any hierarchy of “meaning” and often trust what I call the “sonic logic” of a line or phrase more than its semantic logic. For this playlist, rather than choosing songs that influenced or inspired individual poems, I collaborated with musicians Trevor Welch and Levi Bagdanov to do the reverse: to find songs that were conjured or evoked by the music in the poems themselves. What follows, then, is a type of sonic accompaniment for Fossils in the Making that echoes, recalls, and responds to different aspects of the collection.

Read / Listen here. 

The Making of Fossils in the Making

By admin in blog posts, Fossils in the Making

Thanks to EcoTheo Review for asking me to discuss the process of writing Fossils in the Making as part of their Micro-Essay Series on First Books.

No one’s asked me for advice, including this essay prompt, but if I were to offer any, it would be to pay more attention to these quiet poems. These poems usually don’t get published. They don’t like being alone. Like our own selves, they are formed through their relationship with others, emerging from the ecology of the book rather than being inserted, fully formed, into it. I think this is where the real joy of a collection comes from—the surprising turns and pitches and swerves that propel the reader through it. Journals and magazines tend to favor poems that resemble hit singles, especially in this like-and-share-driven literary market, but you need quiet poems to bring those poems down to earth and draw them into conversation with one another. Nurturing these interstices is, I think, what turns a collection of poems into a poetry collection.

You can read the full essay here.

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