Beth Bachmann’s first book, Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), won the AWP 2008 Donald Hall Prize and 2010 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Elizabeth Willis selected Bachman’s second collection, Do Not Rise (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) as winner of the The Poetry Society of America’s 2011 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Bachman’s poems appear in American Poetry […]
Some things are damned to erupt like wildfire, windblown, like wild lupine, like wings, one after another leaving the stone-hole in the greenhouse glass. Peak bloom, a brood of blue before firebrand. And though, it is late in the season, the bathers, also, obey. One after another, they breathe in […]
It’s impossible to define force, but it’s not hard to figure the size of an arrow drawn in a diagram of the free body. Blunt. Entry. These cannot be measured like the integrity of a wing. If you think of a torso as a box, you can see how someone might want to […]
Some would call this heaven – a teenage girl half-naked in the grass. For all I know, they might be right. The lighting is soft, mid-morning, hazy enough to blur the details, so we can fill them in any way we like. Say, a brunette, barely legal, hidden. From here, it looks like […]
Because of the struggle, her arms and legs resisting, you might take one look at the shape in the snow and say, swan or angel, […]
Beneath the bridge, swallows mold the mask of a woman’s face, clustering mud and tufts of hair dredged up from a ditch, leaving an interruption large enough to enter, to spit wings, which is an odd way to invoke annunciation, a sudden blow. The bones are narrow, so the birds take […]
No shepherds. No nymphs. Maybe just one: the girl the fawn strips like a fisherman’s rose. Death turns its mouth red. It can no longer lie in the lilies. Not on my watch. The lake is filthy with silver fish sticky with leeches. Lovesick, I flick a feather into the […]
Beth Bachmann talks about the formal strategy she employed in her poem “Heaven.”