Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods

Paula Bohince's debut collection, Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods, begins with a speaker invoking her dead father, and unfolds as a kind of mystery novel. Spanning decades, and set on a decrepit, inherited farm in Pennsylvania, the daughter and father navigate the poverty of their environment and their own troubled relationship. Details of the father's murder are gradually uncovered, and we eventually learn that he was killed by a trusted laborer. The speaker lives with this violence, on the farm as an adult, while contending with her own fears, the fallibility of memory, and the voices of ancestors who once occupied this homestead.Bohince has the essential gifts of inventive metaphor and grace with language. But in her case these gifts infuse the poetry with a kind of New Testament glow–the poems see manifestations of innocence and evil as they are, and take note of their sad enmeshment in each of us. The light her poems cast does not prettify the ugly and the unjust. She writes clear-eyed laments for the abandoned and broken and discarded in the human and animal worlds, but she writes from the other side of despair. And, finally, we are lifted and carried through all notions of good and evil, on a wave of redemptive music.