Beholding Eye, Poems by Grace Bauer

Grace Bauer turns the power of her own piercing gaze onto the world of art in her stunning new poetry collection Beholding Eye. The worlds of art and artifice, the creative life and created lives: nothing escapes her scrutiny. Beholding Eye itself is a wonder to behold.

Sample Poems by Grace Bauer

“Grace Bauer, in her brilliant new book of ekphrastic poems, deploys the voices of artists and their subjects to consider matters of identity, power, class, anger, and erotics. With her usual high wit, the poet revises the location and meaning of worth and beauty. Bauer’s formal skill serves to illuminate the ‘thick and pungent’ paint caked on the hands of the maker, as well as the ‘civility and containment’ we must shun to enter ‘A-R-T’—which is what this book does after all: enters its subject to become pure art. Brava!”—Hilda Raz, editor of Prairie Schooner and author of Trans

“If Browning’s Last Duchess were to step out of her canvas and begin reading Walter Benjamin on art and late-stage capitalism, she might produce a book similar to Grace Bauer’s Beholding Eye. These smart, funny ekphrastic poems surprise the reader on every page and surprise anew with each rereading. What Bauer says of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase could pertain equally well to her own poetry: it is ‘designed to disrobe the viewer / . . . to change /forever how we see.”—Julie Kane, author of Rhythm and Booze

“Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Carolyn Kizer—let them make room for Grace Bauer. Sexton’s equal in sardonic vision, Bishop’s equal in the music of speech, Kizer’s equal in rapier wit … I, for one, will try to read every word that this woman writes.”—Will Slattery in ONTHEBUS

Grace Bauer is the author of 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 is co-editor (with Julie Kane) of the anthology, Umpteen Ways Of Looking At A Possum: Creative And Critical Responses To Everette Maddox (Xavier Review Press). She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

ISBN: 1933456299, 112 pages

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