My essay, “Fat Man & Little Boy” is one of this year’s Best American Essays chosen by Vivian Gornick. The collection is available now with Harper Collins. The essay originally appeared in Subtropics.
Recording of me reading my poem “Saving” in The New Yorker
Books with Farrar, Straus and Giroux
PINK, 2021
PINK in The New York Times
From Macmillan:
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.
"These poems remind us we are ourselves inheritors of sexual and political betrayals of the past, of the Old and New Worlds: "David & Goliath / Both have Caravaggio's face-- / Victor & victim same." Restlessly seeking vision in the truths of the body, Baumgartel leaves us these fragments of her imagination: perverse and reckless and always precise. Sylvie Baumgartel is writing the most striking poems of our moment."
-- Richie Hofmann, author of Second Empire, professor at Stanford University
SONG OF SONGS, 2019
Reviews of SONG OF SONGS in The New Yorker and The Rumpus
“Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs is a love letter of such dedication that I often fear the speaker here will be swallowed by the irrevocable musing of her own heart: ‘Here are my shoes that are worn from worship. The worship I do, the worship I am, for you.’ Much of this book is palpable and physical and shameless in its depictions of submission, a testament to all the ways a writer must give up and give in. This is a startling journey.”
Jericho Brown
POEMS
The New Republic
“Pompeii,” November 2023
Poetry International
“Stealth Bomber” and “The Wolves” forthcoming 2024
The New Yorker
“Saving,” 2021
The Paris Review
“Song of Songs” excerpt, 2018 Summer
“Pink,” “The Ponte Vecchio,” 2014 Winter
“Gramercy Park,” “Caprice,” 2013 Winter
“The Fortune Teller, ”“Picnic With Mom,” “The Man in the Big Gray Car,” 2013 Spring
The Nation
“Algeria” 2014
The New York Review of Books
“Etiquette” 2017
Subtropics
“Rebel,” “Hitler in the Americas,” “Black,” “The Hamburg Sisters in Nebraska,” “The Mission Bell,” 2021
“The Washing,” “Cum Clave,” 2018
Harvard Review
“Painting,” “Pregnancy,” 2019
Raritan
13 Poems About Cyrus, 2021
“Girl,” 2019
The Virginia Quarterly Review
“In Rome,” “Mixed Messages,” “Boys & Girls,” “Desire,” “Love,” 2022
“Pink,” “Mothers,” 2020
The PEN Poetry Series
Excerpts from book, SONG OF SONGS, FSG, 2019
The Financial Times
“Family,” 2020
Ploughshares
“Stiletto,” “Volterra,” 2021
The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Love Song,” “The House on Holly Street,” 2020
Brink
“Inheritance,” “Silence,” 2022
Anthologies
“Cum Clave” is included in The Poetry Anthology edited by Jonathan Galassi and Robyn Creswell (FSG, 2021)
“Gramercy Park” is included in the anthology, The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from The Paris Review (Penguin, 2015)
Misc.
Winner of the 2021 C.P. Cavafy Poetry Prize from Poetry International for my poem “Stealth Bomber”
Reading with Richie Hofmann at Unabridged Books, April 21
Baroque classical music to accompany my poetry book PINK at Largehearted Boy.
Interview in Subtropics
Reading at McNally Jackson Books Seaport, NYC with Rowan Ricardo Phillips, October 6, 2022 at 7 pm
Reading at Princeton University with Amy Tan, October 4, 2022 at 7:30 pm
