A Violence

Poems

Paula Bohince

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9780691277769
  9780691277776
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691287393
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A reckoning with psychological and ecological crises from a poet whose work has been praised as “beautiful and riveting” (Los Angeles Review of Books)

A poetic representation of PTSD and its evocative bewilderments, Paula Bohince’s mesmerizing new collection, A Violence, is written at inflection points: a waking from dissociation borne from a harrowing childhood; a breakdown; and a struggle toward wholeness by means of mystified recollection amid ecological disturbances. Praised for poems that “reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads” (The Rumpus), Bohince is here alert to surprise, the enthralling image “rushing through such wreckage a brain becomes.” Contemplating vulnerability and resilience in the entwined human and natural worlds, with a voice precise and powerful, A Violence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self “gone away,” where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series List
• Also by Paula Bohince
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Accordion Music
• Cradle Language
• Escape to Fiji
• The Lambs Are Not for Sale
• Among Barmaids
• Study of Beet and Earring
• Black Cat
• The Arbor
• I Love the Whole World
• Afterglow
• Pillow Talk
• Januaries
• Glass of Milk
• Eelish
• The Egg of Anything
• Lamentation Once Again
• Ouroboros
• Fruitless
• Everything
• At Thirty
• Testimony
• Blue Morpho
• Color Theory
• Two Donkeys in Eternal Rain
• Marrow’s in Vogue
• Black Swans
• Sumptuary
• Restoration
• Epic Rain
• Search Field
• The Bee, 2050
• A Brief History of the Cocktail
• Explicit, 1976
• Lackluster, 2002
• Elk Moving, Midnight in the Great Sand Dunes
• Red Lake
• The News
• The End
• A Violence
• Untitled, 1954
• The Skunk
• Songbird
• Quiet
• Another Language
• The Letdown
• Horizon
• Arcade
• The Bat
• Albino Deer
• Pathway
• Bluebird
• Pokeweed
• Ecce Homo
• The Green
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor