DIURNE: Winner of 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award

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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. 

Yield Architecture

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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.

Order the book.

The Beast That Therefore I Am

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image of beast

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.

READ THE REST AT JACKET2

Editors Ruminate: On the Poetry of Exposure

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Cover Image for Ruminate Magazine: 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

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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 am
writing is not a field
in which I find
or do not find my
self. There is no filling
of graves with dirt, no trans-
posing of blood and earth.

Diurnal Writing

By admin in residency

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

Editors Ruminate: Hauntings

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As I sit down to write this reflection, I feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Not for the task at hand, but for the future. Is this what haunting is? I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, at least not how they tend to be portrayed in movies and books. Specters don’t confine themselves to our simple dichotomies of absence and presence, life and death. They are both and they are between. Haunting is an atmosphere produced by these intra-worldly beings: specters of past lives, of present violence, of the seemingly unalterable conditions of what world will be. The four long poems in this issue will haunt you. You will see in them the faces of children who have been relegated to sacrifice zones; how the smallest measure of matter becomes the destroyer of worlds; how a home buckles under the weight of its history.

Read the rest of my Editors Ruminate on Issue 47: Hauntings

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