Crown of Wild, Winner of the 2018 Two Sylvias Press Wilder Prize, released on September 1, 2020 from Two Sylvias Press. Click here to order or here to order a signed copy!
“‘What is the sound of in ruins, broken?’ In Erica Bodwell’s striking debut, brokenness is inflected with pain and also with beauty. Bodwell knows how humans get damaged and do damage, and sticks close to the stressed and womanly body: its sensations, its pressures, what impinges on it, how it breaks free—or how it can’t. Her sounds are dense and vivid, her characters in these formally-varied lyric narratives are as real as characters in short stories. This is a book I’ll keep coming back to. ”
— Daisy Fried, author of Women's Poetry and My Brother is Getting Arrested Again
“In Erica Bodwell’s Crown of Wild, there are many kinds of wildness. There is the wildness, for instance, found in a young woman’s coming of age, her discovery of both desires and betrayals along the way. There is also the ugly wildness of the pervasive violence against women, especially sexual violence, within the family and in the world beyond. But there is another kind of wildness at work within all these poems. At every turn, this poet sizes up her world for both its menace and its occasional but fleeting beauty. With razor-sharp diction and stunningly original associations, Bodwell’s poems show us that becoming a whole person does not happen by accident. It requires courage, resilience, and, in this case, an unflinching intelligence. These strengths bring the poet to what she calls her own “bright freedom.” Such freedom is an authentic and durable “crown of wild,” and this book is its story.”
— Fred Marchant, author of Said, Not Said and The Looking House
“Can a book of poetry be sexy and sad at the same time? It can if its speaker is inquisitive enough. If she’s wide-ranging and empathetic and forgiving and observant enough. This book of American womanhood rises out of a sensually-grounded tension between “wildish things” like our speaker’s “tresses [like a] nest of milky way & glitter-grouse” and real dangers that lock her into “white-hot needles [of] navy narcotic / oceans” or imaginings of real-world slayings and other sins. Crown of Wild is a street-wise “long waltz with the night” grounded in smart mournful tones. But it does not once give in to self-pity or regret. In fact, Crown of Wild is a joyful book, taking its pleasures out of the redemptive possibilities of both language and life. The lament here is real, but so is the frolic and play. And that’s why you should read it and will love it.”
— Adrian Blevins, author of Appalachians Run Amok and Live from the Homesick Jamboree
“Bristling with life, tender to the touch and so smartly arranged, Erica Bodwell’s Up Liberty Street is a beautiful chapbook, an achievement.”
— Rowan Ricardo Phillips, the award-winning author of Heaven, National Book Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist.
“Erica Bodwell’s Up Liberty Street interrogates what it means to be free as a young girl and woman living in the United States. These are poems of survival–the yellow sparkle snare drum’s solo–that celebrate girlhood and reclaim the body.”
— Emari DiGiorgio, author of The Things a Body Might Become
