Description
Poetry. "Compression has always been one of the poet's most powerful and intoxicating tools, their process of sculpting the poem until it advances for inspection only its most essential mysteries and delights. In Ruth Baumann's fearless, commanding debut collection, PARSE, it becomes something more—the strategy more spiritual than aesthetic, with the stakes being nothing less than the poet's own soul. It's rare to see a debut poet build such alluring density, or such incantatory silence. Baumann's is a devastating, urgent music: 'Above the frame bells toll. / All blood out of / focus. Can you hear?'"—Kaveh Akbar
"It is necessary, at times, for the reader's heart to be wrenched loose from its safe chamber where it doesn't have to look at lives shattered by violence. PARSE is an impossibly unflinching work of insight by a poet who has 'heard / a bird cry in the middle of the night // like it needed dawn now.' With unparalleled intellectual and artistic honesty, Ruth Baumann articulates a childhood ransacked by familial havoc and an adolescence undone by sexual violence. Like our very best poetry, PARSE is written for others, and literature's human truth is broadened by its presence. Here is an injured, unsettling and, yes, a living song."—Katie Ford
"Ruth Baumann's PARSE is a gorgeous mosaic of the fractured pieces of trauma, the glittering jagged shards of memory and annihilation, adoration and loathing, utter darkness and divine light. This is a journey into the soul's dark night, but one that is illuminated by the lantern of art. A beautiful and touching debut collection."—Barbara Hamby
Author Bio
Ruth Baumann is the author of THORNWORK (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), PARSE (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), these tornadoes (Dancing Girl Press, 2018), A Thousand Ars Poeticas (Sixth Finch, 2018), RETRIBUTION BINARY (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), wildcold (Slash Pines Press, 2016) and I'll Love You Forever & Other Temporary Valentines (Salt Hill, 2015). Her poems have been published in Colorado Review, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review, The Journal, Third Coast & others. She received an AWP Intro Journals Project Award in 2014. She holds an MFA from the University of Memphis & is a PhD candidate at Florida State University. Additionally, she is former Managing Editor of The Pinch literary journal, and also was Poetry Editor, Senior Poetry Editor & Assistant Managing Editor of the journal. She has taught both composition classes and creative writing workshops. She currently edits Nightjar Review with Tara Mae Mulroy.
Author City: TALLAHASSEE, FL USA