Pink: Poems - Paperback

by Sylvie Baumgartel (Author)

A sharp, visceral new collection of poetry that touches on art, history, sex, bodies, language, and the color pink

The sack of Rome,
The siege of Florence.
The lights twinkle pink in Fiesole.
Pink furls, pink buds.
Wet pink veiny hearts in spring.
Pink can mean so many things.

Sylvie Baumgartel's Pink moves from the shadow of the Ponte Vecchio to a mission church in Santa Fe, from Daily Mail reports to a photograph of a girl from Tierra del Fuego, from a grandmother's advice ("Don't go to Smith and don't get fat") to legs wrapped around "a man who calls me cake."

Baumgartel, a poet of fierce, intimate, wry language, delivers a second collection about art, history, violence, bodies, fear, pain, reckoning, and transcendence. The poems travel back to the historical, linguistic, and emotional sources of things while surging forward with a stirring momentum, creating a whirlwind of birth and destruction.

Author Biography

Sylvie Baumgartel is the author of Song of Songs (FSG, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The Financial Times, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, Raritan, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the PEN Poetry series, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from "The Paris Review." She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.