Children

Paula Bohince’s first collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, received Sarabande Books’ inaugural Aleda Shirley Prize. Her poems have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, The Nation, Poetry, The Hudson Review, Slate, and The Yale Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Amy Clampitt Trust, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, in addition to the 2010-2011 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. She lives in Pennsylvania.

"There's movement in Bohince's ­poems, but it's gradual and subtle—an eye passing like Ken Burns' camera over a still image, discovering new details. Even in narrative passages, Bohince lets participles do the work of predicates.... 'The Peacock,' about a depressed father who seems destined to leave his young family, mixes sentences and fragments to painterly effect."—The New York Times“Paula Bohince looks back at nature’s enduring and defining cycles in her new collection, The Children, finally concluding ‘In the end, we were landmark,/ compass.’”—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Pre-pub Alert“The plosive thrills and quietly mournful tenor of the finely-wrought poems in Paula Bohince’s The Children reward enormously upon first encounter, and only more so upon subsequent reads.... [A] masterful command of syntax and line.”—Virginia Konchan, The Rumpus“This is a poet whose work I want to keep reading.”—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Memorious“Aptly titled, The Children illuminates a kind of contemporary nostalgia, one the pursues an innocence found only in childhood without forsaking the beautiful complexities of aging and the natural evolution of the wildlife around us: “Virus in my heart. Branches / salted with buds, soft- / eyed on a sill.”—Kelly Forsythe, The Los Angeles Review“These verses conjure rural southwest Pennsylvania as an exotic locale, swirled with pussy willow, milkweed, hornet nests of gray papier-mâché, velvet-antlered deer, mushrooms like men on horseback, flusters of quail flushed from briar. . . . We are drawn into an interior network that at its best sets off Plath-like, compressed-energy depth charges of imagery.”—Mike Schneider, Pittsburgh City Paper

• ONE Pussy WillowThe AnimalsThe ChildrenThe PeacockThe DogwoodThe HiveMechanical Horse with Girl and BeesWithout ComparePinot NoirEvening WalkSnow BirdsGethsemaneMother's QuailTWOHare in SnowMilkweedEvergreenMan on HorsebackGypsy Moths, or BelovedPaper DollsNight VisionGreylockRobin's EggGreen River FugueThe BraceletLenox AubadeEverywhere I Went that Spring, I Was AloneNostalgicOwl in RetrogradeTHREESnowy River VisionsThe BedroomApril BlizzardBaby HazelFloodImaginary HusbandHornets' NestClotheslineWildwood DiptychEntering the OuseFroth of the Tides and the Further OutSilverfishYellow LeavesSpring