Retreats & Recognitions

Grace Bauer is the author of Beholding Eye (CustomWords, 2006) and The Women At The Well (Portals Press, 1997) as well as three chapbooks of poems: Where You've Seen Her (Pennywhistle Press), The House Where I've Never Lived (Anabiosis Press), and Field Guide To The Ineffable: Poems On Marcel Duchamp (Snail's Pace Press). Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including: Arts & Letters, Colorado Review, Doubletake, Margie, Poetry, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and others. She has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, Individual Artists Grants from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the Nebraska Arts Council, and Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center. She is co-editor (with Julie Kane)of Umpteen Ways Of Looking At A Possum: Critical And Creative Responses To Everette Maddox (Xavier Review Press). She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

All one has to do is read 'Note From the Imaginary Daughter,' the first poem in Grace Bauer's Retreats and Recognitions, and you'll be caught in the grip of psychological drama and an evocative imagination that will make you want to read further. Bauer's poems probe the dark landscapes between impression and apprehension, the past and its repetition though imaginative transformation, impulse and restraint. Her delivery is tough and terse; her imagery is fresh and often startling. There is experience and authority in her voice. She can be immensely witty, as in 'Plot Lines,' where she improvises on the word, tale, or virtuoso as in her intricate sestina, 'A Little Like Dorothy.' Succinct, like 'Awakened By the Fall,' and evocative, like 'Lunacy.' Her poems are poignant, intelligent, and believable. Poetry lovers, read this book!" - Robert Pack