Swallows and Waves

One of Eight Notable Titles for 2016, Pittsburgh City Paper

"There’s movement in Bohince’s ­poems, but it’s gradual and subtle — an eye passing like Ken Burns’s camera over a still image, discovering new details."
—New York Times Book Review

"This collection of evocative poems brings to life a world long gone but resonant with our own. Each finely wrought poem reveals hidden depths upon rereading. One not to miss."
—Library Journal, starred review

"Bohince’s quiet revelations shed a strange, sometimes painful light on what seems familiar. . . . Bohince offers a discreet, surprising kind of ekphrasis."
—Publishers Weekly

"Ekphrasis seems too sharp a word. . . to describe the silky music of these elegantly balanced poems. . . . Many Western poets, from Ezra Pound to Gary Synder, have been hopelessly in love with Japanese culture and its exotic erotics, but Bohince joins the very best of writers who slide open the screens, fully aware there are other screens still concealing our deepest pleasures and pains.”
—The Harvard Review

"A collection of surprising, almost concrete, coherence. The poems are invariably short; some vignettes are quickly sketched as if in watercolor, others more finely engraved; some poems hide a narrative, others an emotion. But most striking is that while the array of images is vast, they are tied together by a similar, stylistic sensibility."
—Asian Review of Books

"Lithe and exacting, this collection draws inspiration from old Japanese woodblock prints and scroll paintings, resulting in lines at once visual and isolating."
—Foreword Reviews, "The Best Poetry of Winter 2016"

“Paula Bohince has written a series of exquisite ekphrastic miniatures based upon Japanese scroll paintings and woodblocks of the Edo period . . . Compressed and delicately shaded, the words of these poems are treated as pigments, applied sometimes in daubs of pure verbal color, sometimes in fine washes that simulate transparency.”
—“Immortal Hand or Eye” by Jamie James, Parnassus: Poetry in Review

"Each scroll and print is a scene, and from each Bohince designs a narrative, her lines heavy with precise detail, distinct motions, bare truths, and subtle wishes.  Remote yet highly intimate, Swallows and Waves walks a neat path between secret and revelation.” 
—The Cincinnati Review

"In these emotionally restrained lyrics, Bohince adeptly observes her own feelings as she sees them reflected in the Japanese scrolls she describes. These poems bear rereading in order to allow their delicate subtleties, like reflections on a still pond, to emerge."
—The Hopkins Review, "The Ekphrastic Moment," print and online

"[Bohince] has a knack for startling lyricism and unusual images. . . . Bohince's notebook of green observations and red feelings has yielded a collection of deeply sensuous poems--poems that ask us to look at the world anew."
—The Hudson Review

"Paula Bohince’s empathic lyrics based on Japanese scroll paintings and wood prints demonstrate 'how attention and technique coalesce / into art.' She has written a carefully made, elegantly poised, and deeply humane book of poems.
—Edward Hirsch

"Paula Bohince’s renderings of brilliantly particular Japanese woodcuts and paintings in Swallows and Waves both honor and extend their precipitating subjects. Mind­play, word­play, and world­play combine in these consummate ekphrastic poems, offering–just as the original artworks do, but in a vocabulary unmistakably Bohince’s own–glimpses of life as it always exists: inside action, moment, and the implausible, multiply­layered silks, pelts, and feathers of felt existence."
—Jane Hirshfield