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.

A debut poetry collection from a writer whose vivid verse explores the connections and relationships that make us human Sometimes I like to feel sexy. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I like to be very plain. Invisible almost, hiding in plain sight. I want to hide and to be found. In the spirit of the biblical Song of Solomon, Sylvie Baumgartel's Song of Songs takes the subjects of love and worship, and brings them to the desperate, wild spaces of domestic life. With a voice at once precise and oneiric, Baumgartel explores the landscapes of sex and desire, power and submission, in this groundbreaking book-length poem that forces us to question the bounds of devotion. An ambitious and vivid debut, Song of Songs is a work of breathtaking honesty, couched in language few of us are brave enough to speak aloud.