I’m pleased to announced that I am one of ten graduate students to receive a dissertation fellowship from Phi Kappa Phi! You can read more about the award here and an overview of my dissertation, Nuclear Forms, here.
DIURNE: Winner of 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award
Thrilled to announce that my project, DIURNE, which was written over the course of a month while at Vermont Studio Center in 2017, has been selected by Timothy Donnelly as the winner of the 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award!
Kristin George Bagdanov’s Diurne begins with the proclamation: “a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making.” In the gorgeously lyrical hybrid text that follows, Bagdanov does the nearly impossible—that is, she merges procedural and confessional modes of writing. The end result is a text as deeply felt as it is restrained, as grounded as it is philosophical in its implications.
Read more about the prize, finalists & semi-finalists here.
You can read a blogpost that goes into detail about the logic behind this project here.
MLA 2019
Thanks to everyone who came out to the New Nuclear Criticism panel at MLA 2019! Here’s the archived page with more information about the panels and speakers.
Matter Monthly
Two poems up in the November issue of Matter Monthly! I call “Lines Written After Crisis” a disarticulated sonnet and “Post-“ a residual sonnet.
As if speech were a carcass / mounted upon a wall
Were your caress a revolution that could // make a tyrant fall
Yield Architecture
I loved reviewing Jake Syersak’s debut poetry collection, Yield Architecture for Colorado Review:
Yield Architecture, the debut full-length collection from Jake Syersak, is an unyielding investigation of how linguistic and material structures intersect to shape one’s perception of reality. “Yield” here connotes both productivity and acquiescence: the measured output of machine and human as well as the softening of resolve, the point at which one gives in to a structure rather than resisting it. A poem, of course, both yields to and yields its own architecture: revising, incorporating, and resisting forms and ghosts of forms that necessarily populate it. Read the rest.
The Beast That Therefore I Am
The Beast That Therefore I Am by Kristin George Bagdanov
Eight poetry collections published in the past four years turn to the beast as an alternative way of inhabiting the world. This beastly turn has ontological, political, and aesthetic implications for how we theorize the relationship between poetry and personhood (and all of its Enlightenment-era baggage). This review explores both the impetuses and outcomes of these beast-filled encounters but stops short of offering a grand theory of “the beast,” as such a move would undermine the motivating reasons for embodying and embracing beasts as kin.
Finalist, Omnidawn 2018 Chapbook Contest
Very excited that “Diurne,” a procedural project I wrote while in residency at Vermont Student Center in summer 2017, was one of five finalists in the 2018 Omnidawn chapbook contest. Read more about “Diurne” here.
Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Exposure
” Exposure
“A vulnerability index measures exposure. In climate science, it estimates the resiliency of communities that will bear the brunt of rising temperatures and seas. In social work, it identifies who should be prioritized for services according to their health and fragility. In the financial sector, it gauges a consumer’s level of economic insecurity and stress. In all cases, to be exposed is to be subject to harm.”
Read more about the poetry of Exposure & order your copy today. (25% of all proceeds will go to a local sexual assault victims advocacy center (SAVA).
2018 Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize
My poem “unfield,” which won the 2018 Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize at UC Davis, is now online at the Academy of American Poets website. This poem is also pretty representative of the concerns in my forthcoming book, Fossils in the Making.
The poem I amwriting is not a fieldin which I findor do not find myself. There is no fillingof graves with dirt, no trans-posing of blood and earth.
Diurnal Writing
I wrote about my procedural project, “Diurne,” for Rob Mclennan’s Small Press Writing Day project.
“Writing “Diurne” helped me debunk the myth of lyric immediacy I often confronted in poetry by making the writing process durational rather than inspirational, work rather than epiphany. It was a project weighed down by mediation, that often had to muse upon its own making as a way to pass the time, that could not erase the traces of labor that kept it pinned to the ordinary.”
Read the rest here