Beth Bachmann

Biography

Beth Bachmann is the author of three books, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press: Temper (2009), Do Not Rise (2015), and CEASE (2018). A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship in Poetry and VQR’s Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry, she lives in Nashville and New York City.

See Work

POETRY / Winter 2020

Famous Writers

By Beth Bachmann

There must’ve been some incident, something to push both Dickinson and Proust into isolation, the horse thought as a student, but now he thinks time and immortality require one’s full attention. 

POETRY / Winter 2020

Time/bomb

By Beth Bachmann

Your heart is like an island, like a bomb chambered for containment and you should handle my heart like a rare species of flower that grows only here, like a thing that can destroy.

POETRY / Winter 2020

On Solitude

By Beth Bachmann

Rats can laugh, but the dogs aren’t smiling: they’re hooked on oxytocin, which rises when we lock eyes with one another. Oxytocin is not dissimilar to OxyContin, an opioid analgesic which can result in a similar sense of euphoria or...

POETRY / Winter 2020

zoo/m/enagerie

By Beth Bachmann

Time is the distance between birth and death. Parallel universes appear in real time on your screen. Place is an illusion. For instance, I am in the Palace of Versailles.

POETRY / Winter 2020

Children in America

By Beth Bachmann

go to the library to learn how to administer NARCAN
to stop their mother or father’s heart from overdosing. 

POETRY / Fall 2018

Shower

By Beth Bachmann

Man made the lake to catch the water.

It’s how man gets the gold out of the mountain. 

POETRY / Fall 2018

Mother of All Monsters

By Beth Bachmann

If hunted for oil, hunted for light.

After the terror, the whales swarmed.

POETRY / Fall 2018

Golden

By Beth Bachmann

I wore the face of the animal to lure the animal into shooting range.

This was symmetry. 

POETRY / Fall 2018

Afterwinds, while inside the head of the cloud

By Beth Bachmann

The Gold Codes are the launch codes the president must keep on his person to initiate a nuclear strike.

Nicknamed “the biscuit,” there’s something domestic about it, as though nuclear attack were akin to pressing the soft flesh of a...

POETRY / Spring 2017

State

By Beth Bachmann

your name for purposes of identification

how can I when it’s failed

better a border made of water

harder to cross

each seed is different

like each tongue

how many heads

was the right question to ask