A Violence: Poems

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, AViolence is a haunting collection that builds symphonically to recover a self ＂gone away,＂ where the ordinary is imbued with transcendental significance.

Paula Bohince is the author of three previous poetry collections, Swallows and Waves, The Children, and Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.