Carolina Quarterly: Review of Fossils in the Making

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

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

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.

Review of Diurne in Glass Poetry Journal

Thanks to Cody Stetzel for this new review of DIURNE!

“A spectacular achievement in diary and poetry and mindfulness; this book melds the real, surreal, and unreal in a neat alchemy of the mind. One of the most stark features of this book are the ever-increasing stakes of personal divulgence that several of Bagdanov’s poems end with. Bringing with it a dare, Bagdanov risks a level of investment and engagement for the reader — demanding their complicity in the sheer act of not abusing information provided. I think of this psychological projection in the mode of persona, but instead of personae-as-escape, George Bagdanov provokes the personae-as-infection; destined to give readers a clearer understanding of their own imaginations as opposed to the traditional poetic goal of swinging wide the padlocked doors to an Author’s imagination. Possibility is transfigured toward the reader’s capacity for creation and connection.

Read the rest here.

MOUTHFUL OF FLESH: review of fossils in the making

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.

Poetry Society: In their own words

Thanks to Poetry Society of America for inviting me to talk about Diurne (Tupelo Press, 2019)! You can read the first poem from the collection and my reflections on its composition here.

In Diurne, I try (and often fail) to develop a method I call “impersonal intimacy,” offering to the reader different types of personal information—credit card #, address, email, as well as family histories, personal insecurities, and confessions to see what might register as expressions of lyric subjectivity and wondering which is the more intimate: my data or my desires. Or how one expresses or suppresses the other.

River Rail: Occupy Colby

River Rail Cover
River Rail Cover

I’m honored to have some new poems in the environmental offshoot of The Brooklyn Rail: The River Rail, which “brings together artists, scientists, and writers concerned with environmental issues and climate change.” Read the whole issue online here.

The issue features field notes on ice cores from a geochemist and paleoclimatologist, incredible art and interviews, as well as some ecological poetry (including mine). You can read my poems “Atomic Shade,” “The Uncene,” and “Chain Reaction” here.

Special shout out to Chris Walker, Denise Bruesewitz, and Kerill O’Neill, the co-editors of The River Rail: Occupy Colby, for inviting me to contribute to this diverse and urgent collection. And gratitude to artistic director and publisher Phong Bui for creating this space and vision.

SLSA 2019

If you’re attending SLSA 2019 or in the LA / Orange County area, there are two chances to hear from our roundtable about the science of poetry:

Thursday, 11/7 at Skylight Books in LA, 7:30pm and Saturday, 11/9 at UCI, 3:45-5:15

Poetry and Science at the Margins: In this roundtable, six poets will read and discuss work about their engagements with science that was or is considered peripheral to mainstream scientific theory and practice. The participants are Will Alexander, Karen Leona Anderson, Kristin George Bagdanov, Amy Catanzano, Adam Dickinson and Stephanie Strickland. Addressing physics, mathematics, biology, as well as other scientific disciplines, these poets will ask how cultural forces shape and define “the marginal” as well as the ingenious ways that science was transformed by marginal practitioners. This roundtable will also ask why poetry, as a genre sometimes considered both marginal and experimental, is well suited to treat questions of knowledge, power, and speculation at the boundaries, and we’ll discuss how poets use such language not just to represent, but to intervene in, the processes of scientific inquiry.  Drawing on everything from early microscopy to contemporary physics, these readings will Involve the audience in a discussion of the embodied, material consequences of “experimental engagements” for both scientists and poets