Fossils in the Making
from Black Ocean
In her debut collection, Kristin George Bagdanov offers a collection of poems that want to be bodies and bodies that want to be poems. This desire is never fulfilled, and the gap between language and world worries and shapes each poem. Fossils in the Making presents poems as feedback loops, wagers, and proofs that register and reflect upon the nature of ecological crisis. They are always in the making and never made. Together these poems echo word and world, becoming and being. This book ushers forward a powerful and engaged new voice dedicated to unraveling the logic of poetry as an act of making in a world that is being unmade.
Order from Black Ocean
Praise for FITM:
The ambiguity that is the soul of poetry takes on sublime new shapes in Kristin George Bagdanov’s delicately searing poems. An inventive syntax affords a wondrous multiplicity, confounding logic by confronting it, blurring binaries in acts of composition and decomposition. Fossils in the Making has everything readers want from literature: originality, profound subjects, depth of intellect and emotion. In her first book, Kristin George Bagdanov testifies to the largest concerns — mortality, appetite, embodiment, love, time — with devastating eloquence, and in doing so, encounters the great mystery that is existence — and poetry.
— Alice Fulton
Freud suggested that ‘no mortal can keep a secret…betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.’ Similarly, Kristin George Bagdanov believes that language will give up its secrets, as well as the secrets of the earth. ‘I was a knowing thing/ I trusted my body/ the apparatus of truth.’ But also, ‘A rigorous thought is a cloud/ do not trust its color.’ The betrayals (etymologically, handing over) of truth add up to a gorgeous poetry made of a brilliantly shattering intelligence: that of the poet, yes, but of the world as we find it at this moment, shatteringly betrayed by our technologies.”
— Bin Ramke
“What matters?” ask these intelligent poetic proofs and wagers, in which “a fly is important” and the body is an “apparatus of truth.” Drawing from sources as diverse as Donne, Herbert and the chemistries of cultural and molecular anti-bodies, these poems contemplate a world “unmade in our image” with a lyric urgency that is both spiritual and environmental.
—Evelyn Reilly
Reviews:
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.
—Joely Fitch, Broadsided Press
George Bagdanov’s poetry operates interrogatively and curiously through its reflexive, multi-faceted modes of inquiry that is embodied in its formal experimentation.
—Benjamin Platt, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars
Kristin George Bagdanov’s debut collection ponders questions of ecology and the body, or what she calls the “world as it uncreates / itself: creature / of its own making.” Ontological quandaries of being, consuming, and having all appear alongside trash gyres, fossil fuels, and food chains; a contrapuntal poem and an internal acrostic accompany lyric poems about birth and toxic chemicals. Taken as a whole, Fossils in the Making speaks to our current ecological disaster and human life therein.”
— The Georgia Review
The final poem, fittingly named “echo / o” turns on its internal sounds; “o” is, after all, the symbol for Oxygen, the gyre’s center, the mark of invocation. The invocation is to anyone—or anything—that is listening. Bagdanov encourages us to make our attempts but also recognize that these attempts are folded within other bodies, that we both carry and are carried by the gyre’s currents. And if our making is an undoing, then perhaps our undoing will be our making too.
Find Fossils on Goodreads
Diurne: Winner of the 2019 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize
The cover image for Diurne is titled “Two Years: Sifted Pencil Shavings,” by Pecos Pryor.
Diurne is a procedural project, “a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making,” that explores how poetry is durational rather than inspirational, work rather than epiphany. It is part autobiography, part journalism, part theory, and part apology for not being traditional “poetry.”
“Whip-smart, allusive, aphoristic, cheekily instructive…shot with lyricism, endlessly playful, intimate, anxious, and often laugh-out-loud funny, Diurne achieves with great grace and relative efficiency what the best examples of its subgenre have to offer: it limns a sense of consciousness through whatever’s at hand as it places the noteworthy on equal footing with the banal.” –Timothy Donnelly, final judge for the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize
Order from Tupelo
Praise for Diurne:
“Kristin George Bagdanov has a gift of being able to make lyrics from our daily moments; she finds depth where others only see surfaces; she finds mystery and sets that mystery to music. Her method is impersonal intimacy, she says. This is the intimacy of living with our 21st century vocabulary, our 21st century problems, our 21st century issues—and, yet, finding in all of that the music of waking thought. ‘I am on a verge of waking,’ she says, ‘I find an edge inside myself and push.’ This is an intricate, compelling, necessary work.”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
“Every morning the mind wakes up and reminds itself it is itself, and every night, tired of the endeavor, it lets itself forget. In between, in those waking hours, we think, or think we think, and it is in those skeptical, hypothetical, insecure, brazen, shallow, wonder-struck, wanting, worrying hours that Kristin George Bagdanov’s small book of poetry-philosophy works its necessary work. Her method—a line for every waking hour—lets us glimpse the ever-wounded mind who in its myriad cares knows everything but how to make sense of it all, how exactly to say ‘I.’ So it is she offers us a gift, as real poetry must, not of knowledge, but of learning ever more honestly to say ‘I don’t know’—& yet, so much is known, so much knows us. I want to say this book teaches me that we all wake every day into a Daedalean labyrinth, none of us think we have a thread, but we have the threads that are thoughts, thousands of them. They might not rescue us, but as George Bagdanov so beautifully knows, it isn’t rescue we want, but learning to be more mindfully lost.”
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of gentlessness and Of Silence and Song
“‘Many still set the aesthetic against the political,’ worries the text, refusing to do the same, also refusing to pretend the difficulty has been overcome. Instead it lies down with the difficulty and says, ‘I wait for a poem to wake me up,’ while generously offering poem after poem that does the trick and sets us leaping.”
—Joshua Clover, poet and professor at the University of California Davis.
Reviews:
Chaotically weaving witticisms, adages, and inquiries with metaphors and non sequiturs, the second book from Bagdanov (Fossils in the Making) attempts to embody the mystery and mayhem churning beneath the surface of everyday life.
— Publishers Weekly
A spectacular achievement in diary and poetry and mindfulness; this book melds the real, surreal, and unreal in a neat alchemy of the mind.
— Cody Stetzel in Glass Poetry Journal
Find Diurne on Goodreads