Scorpio

This week’s other featured book, “Life During Wartime,” by Katie Rogin, can be found by scrolling down below this post, along with the First Tuesday Replay. Or, click the author’s name on our Author’s page

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THE BOOK: Scorpio,

PUBLISHED IN: 2018

THE AUTHOR: Katy Bohinc.

THE EDITOR: Keith Tuma.

THE PUBLISHER: Miami University Press.

SUMMARY: My editor told me Scorpio was a book of love songs. It took me a while to see it, as I believe Scorpio is the most political of my work, but it is also full of love songs. Scorpio is a book of poems which embody my struggle to re-integrate into American life after working in China as a human rights activist. Emotional realities that I experienced in China were too painful to recount in paragraphs (and almost uncomprehensible during the early days of Facebook); it was much easier to put meanings to my experiences – and emotions – through poetry. Hence my sense this book was “political.” However in retrospect I suppose it was through the pain of the violence I witnessed which instilled in me the desire to cry out for Love as the common human vehicle for good.

These poems are translations in a sense, to an American landscape and mythology; the best I can imagine to represent “Americana” – from contemporary urban living to my childhood growing up in rural Ohio, driving around on back country roads with only the trees, fields, wind and…the radio. The old-fashioned radio, that (free!) quintessential American music of the car which seems to go unthanked for shaping generations of musicality. There seems to always be a soundtrack.

THE BACK STORY: I rarely “decide” to write a poem. I practice writing poems, sure, but when the real thing comes, it comes like a fugue. I get anxious or dizzy and suddenly start pacing and think, “what’s going on?” and then I think “OK I’m going to write a poem” and I scribble or type and it pours out. That’s one kind. Another kind is sort of like walking in a rainbow: I catch the vibe, go outside and stroll a bit and as if in a dream the words come. This almost sounds ridiculous (and totally cliché) but it is very much like the ancient traditions of the mystics: it’s a feeling, a deep intuition that I’m opening myself to.

WHY THIS TITLE?: The poems are all the words one associates with the sun sign scorpio: emotional, political, sexual, deep, rebirthing, loyal, sensitive and unforgiving. (I am also a scorpio sun with gemini rising and taurus moon. In a cute note, all the wonderful poets who blurbed the book also are scorpio sun or moon.)

WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? I spent a great deal of time on the order of the poems so that it reads like a music album. This was harder to execute than one might imagine (it took days of reading the entire thing out loud) but I think it’s this touch that really makes the book “sing.” (like the radio I always had on growing up.)

REVIEW COMMENTS:

“Poems sear in their straightforward simplicity…Bohinc delivers an astute, witty, feminist collection.” – Publishers Weekly “The feeling of having just encountered new possibilities for lyric poetry.” -Tom Snarsky

“Bohinc’s engagement with the political, the historical, and the scientific in Scorpio bubbles to a roiling boil but doesn’t spill over, proving that poetry can be at once visceral and factual, earthy and Einsteinian, metaphysical and mathematical.” – American Book Review.

AUTHOR PROFILE: I am a poet by night and a data scientist by day. This is apparently a show stopping thing to say at dinner parties. People rarely meet poets and sometimes meet data scientists but they find it literally remarkable when they meet it in the same person. Lol. People usually say “you do math and poetry? wow what a combination!?” It is to the point where I don’t even know what to say anymore because I’m tired of having the same conversation! But just last night at a holiday party someone said, “like when we were kids, we did both at the same time.” I loved this!! Usually I have to stop and explain what the overlap is between math and poetry, or how I do both at the same time, or how it’s actually more and more common in the computer age, or historically there are tons of examples of science and art deeply intertwined and most everything combines math and art at some level, or many other tricks I’ve learned over the years. I think my new response is: “All the kids are doing it!” I’m very fortunate that Scorpio is my third book of poetry. The first was Dear Alain, a collection of love letters to the philosopher Alain Badiou which is ultimately a metaphor about the relationship between poetry and philosophy. The second book, Trinity Star Trinity reclaims the ancient ode or chant in a simple, longstanding rhythm of 3 times 3 times 3 (3 cubed) — or 27 poems of 27 words each.) I wrote it in Greece, and it is dedicated to the Goddess Hera, my symbol of the Divine Feminine. Since 2013, I’ve collaborated on the esteemed Tender Buttons Press with Founding Editor Lee Ann Brown. We publish experimental women’s poetry, expanding the field of possible and probable since 1989. Through Tender Buttons I’ve edited two volumes of poetry: Tender Omnibus: The First Twenty-Five Years of Tender Buttons Press and Please Add To This List: A Guide To Teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets and Experiments.

AUTHOR COMMENTS: I wasn’t ever entirely sure why I was writing poetry, but I was, and it became a force in my life I had to serve. Sometimes still it’s hard to believe I wrote them. It’s not always easy to write poems, many came with long crying sobs of release. But it’s time now in America for this book, Scorpio. I hope they provide solace and catharsis to readers, as well as laughter, one of our greatest weapons against adversity, alongside love.

I hope these poems bring the reader an experience of love. If we don’t practice love it could cease to exist. Love is a knowing that must be taught and learned. In my humble opinion, love is the greatest art of our lives and love’s practice is our deepest responsibility to humanity.

SAMPLE CHAPTER: https://www.amazon.com/Scorpio-Katy-Bohinc/dp/1881163636

LOCAL OUTLETS: http://www.orgs.miamioh.edu/mupress/details/bohinc_scorpio.html .

WHERE ELSE TO BUY IT: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, etc.

PRICE: $17.00.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: StarArkestress@gmail.com