This page contains two sections, the one directly below, Other Books of Interest and, following it, Online Poems & Essays.
Other Books of Interest
Praise for Closing the Hotel Kitchen
“Robert Bohm's Closing the Hotel Kitchen is full of a quiet anger that burns like white phosphorous. There is no turning away from these poems and no forgiveness. They relentlessly catch us off guard and the voices hold us--tugging at our sleeves and forcing us to see their awful truths. These are essential poems of our moment.”
—Gerald McCarthy, poet and author of Trouble Light, The Doorway in the Wall and other books, including an upcoming memoir, Hitchhiking Home from Danang . . . A Memoir of Vietnam, PTSD and Reclamation.
~
“I’ve never read anything like this volume. Part fiction, part chronicle, a book length poem in which the narrator’s voice is that of a generation’s voice “in search of a form that might give it meaning.” These astounding poems gain their momentum from an accumulation of contradictory unresolved images from childhood, the denied past and the wars of the author’s youth (WW2, cold war, Vietnam). All this is a prelude to Bohm’s vision of what comes next, the relentless, violent betrayals and lies of a society and government that changed us permanently into “adults” disconnected from what we once wanted and thought and believed. Closing the Hotel Kitchen is a great and important work. Bohm’s stunning language and brilliant poetics are a match for its vision. He shows us a whole new way to write.”
— Sharon Doubiago, author (among other books) of Hard Country and Love on the Street, both poetry, and My Father’s Love, a memoir.
~
"Closing the Hotel Kitchen is about falling apart when that is the only route left to sanity. It takes place during the 1960s and early 1970s, from New York's streets to Vietnam and India. Untouched by nostalgia or baby-boomer sentimentality, these poems offer a searing, visceral look at the narrator's attempts to find coherence within a violent world unexplained by his inherited Christianity or his family's patriotism. Scenes and imagery evoking place, class, and ethnicity fuel the book from beginning to end. Presenting an up-close portrait of a previous era, the book sheds an unsettling light on the present one in which our nation continues to stumble over issues evoked in Closing. But Bohm's often dark lyricism also offers more than a journey into an abyss. His poetry, displaying a capacity to listen to others' voices and assimilate their experiences, provides glimpses of transformation."
~
Closing the Hotel Kitchen is available at:
——————————————————————————————————
Acclaim for What the Bird Tattoo Hides
"Robert Bohm's What the Bird Tattoo Hides is a poetry of witness at its best. He combines extraordinary observation with genuine understanding. His poems on India are completely free from the exoticizing and mystifying gaze of too many non-Indian writers.
Places like the village of Vijaynagar—where the poet has spent much time—come alive here not as sites of official history, but as subaltern spaces. Ordinary people—tramps, lottery ticket sellers, sandal-menders, old turnip vendors, women with twisted spines carrying baskets filled with stones for road-building, Bihar's armed tribals slipping between trees 'like words about to make a sentence'— in such people, Bohm traces, through their struggles and stories, the dream for a different life.
Love is in these poems, and pain, anger, rebellion. Empathizing with the deprived, he makes his poetry not from abstractions but from lived reality."
—K.Satchidanandan, one of India's leading poets, has published more than 20 poetry volumes and his work has been translated into 17 languages. For ten years he served as Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of letters.
~
What the Bird Tattoo Hides is available at:
——————————————————————————————————
In the Americas wins award for Best Book
“For Robert Bohm, the America we despair over and cower before is already a little behind. He walks the road of an exile in his own land, and his anger is the emanation of his love . . . In the Americas (is) the most serious, the most radical, the most visionary of all the books considered for this award. This is why it won our prize for the year's best poetry volume by a new writer.”
—Statement from the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) Awards Committee
~
“Bohm should be afraid for his life. Franco had the poet Federico Garcia Lorca put to death for poems like these. "Revolution is a profession. Like being an auto mechanic," Bohm writes . . . To top it all off, his fine ear for the spoken tongue and concern for personal as well as political elements make these poems good literature, not polemics.”
—New Roots
——————————————————————————————————
Online Poems & Essays
Poems
Five Poems @ Stirring: A Literary Review
Three Poems @ Underground Voices
Four Poems @ 3:AM Magazine
This Bitter Crop Hasn’t Ended @ Radius Archives
Easter 1914 @ Dissident Voice
~
Essays
American Dance of Life @ Dissident Voice
Techno Capitalism: a Fever Burning Everywhere @ Real Progressives
Through the Distortion, Flickerings of Illumination @ Real Progressives
Identity Theft and the Body’s Disappearance @ Hampton Institute
David Walker’s Appeal: Thinking about White Supremacy’s Alchemy @ Hampton Institute