Scorpio

Poetry. SCORPIO's poems are at turns dramatic and mundane as a lust-filled pop song. They take us back to the poet's youth in suburban Ohio and move forward through the economic collapse of 2008 into a present where democracy often seems at risk. One poem hopes that a "SWOLLEN HEART" will "BURN BRIGHTER THAN THIS" while declaring that "MONOGAMY IS LIKE MARXISM" because "IT EXISTS BEST ON PAPER." Another is white hot with the memory while still another explores the simple social awkwardness of a houseguest asking for a towel. Author of the celebrated DEAR ALAIN (Tender Buttons Press, 2014), letters about love, poetry, and philosophy addressed to French philosopher Alain Badiou, Bohinc employs a variety of prose and verse forms to write about eros colliding with ego as all our explanations fail. Much as the scorpion is the ultimate survivor, these poems confront the damage done to us but do not succumb to it, naming Love, personal and abstract, as its remedy.

Katy Bohinc grew up in the outskirts of Cleveland and graduated from Georgetown with degrees in Pure Mathematics and Comparative Literature, leaving her studies for a time to work in Beijing with the Chinese Urgent Action Working Group, a human rights organization. Now living in New York City, she works as a data scientist and marketer. Since 2013 she has collaborated with Lee Ann Brown in directing Tender Buttons Press, a distinguished publisher of experimental women's poetry for which she edited TENDER OMNIBUS: The First Twenty-Five Years of Tender Buttons Press (2015) and Please Add To This List: A Guide to Teaching Bernadette Mayer's Sonnets and Experiments (2014). Bohinc is the author of Dear Alain (Tender Buttons, 2014), letters to the French philosopher Alain Badiou about poetry, philosophy, and love; a book of poems about the divine feminine, Trinity Star Trinity (Scarlet Imprint, 2017); and Scorpio (Miami University Press, 2018).