Pitter-patter of its little feet: morningawakening against shutter. Someone in bed, signalingC’mere. When the kiss opens, tips intothat mindless place. Wisteria druggy on a spear-tipped gate.Stone pine grown accustomed to the city, protectingthe vast veranda. Shyness. Flood offeel-good in the stream. Then the inability to feel the glint of it,pitiable silver of Was once. The phantomsuckle. Sensation of being filled, of filling up, a perfumethe wisteria—April’s ache—conducts.
The Letdown
Paula Bohince
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A Violence: Poems (2025), published by Princeton University Press and reprinted here by permission.
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Patrick Mullen
Patrick Mullen
Paula Bohince is a 2026 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of four poetry collections, most recently A Violence (Princeton, 2025). Her poems have appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, Australian Book Review, and The New Yorker. She has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She lives in Pennsylvania.
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.
"Paula Bohince’s fourth poetry collection, A Violence, moves fluidly through the different forms of violence we create, forget, never quite recover from, witness but not confront, and live in the cold shadow of. . . . In and through her poetry, she locates an intricate ecosystem in which the shards of violence reside, and she doggedly makes a habitat in it, dwelling there in order to explore the very heartbeat of meaningfulness."
—Christos Kalli, The Rumpus
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