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In Nightmares That Leave Grease Stains On Psych Ward Walls, Robert Bohm has given us something extraordinary: poems not merely about the posttraumatic stress that assaults so many of us in these times, but ones born from that  posttraumatic stress. These are texts that take us into lived experience and allow us to know an enemy that can never be fully defeated. War, violence, abuse and most recently pandemic have made so many of us tragically familiar with PTSD. Yet Bohm’s poems are also strangely hopeful. Their ability to involve the reader and then release him or her lies in the poet’s attention to detail, to inner meaning and overall significance.

   —Margaret Randall, author of Stormclouds Like Unkept Promises

 

 

The true and deadly legacy of war is that the trauma never leaves.  So, a question arises that asks, What are we to do with these moments that haunt us?  Reading Robert Bohm’s new collection, I’ve discovered the answer: write poems that don’t politicize the war, or that don’t sentimentalize the war, but that reveal to the reader the careful and deadly details of combat, with a sharp precision and a powerfully ironic tone.  Bravo, I say, and I urge you to read this book.

   —Bruce Weigl, poetry award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize nominee for Song of Napalm and The Abundance of Nothing, received the Bronze Star for his service with the U.S. Army in Vietnam

 

 

 

More on Robert Bohm

 

In the Americas

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 . . . our prize for the year's best poetry volume by a new writer.

   —From the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) Awards Committee

 

 

Closing the Hotel Kitchen

Closing the Hotel Kitchen is a great and important work. Bohm’s stunning language and brilliant poetics are a match for its vision. The impetus is nothing less than to be a midwife of a whole new way to write.

   —Sharon Doubiago, author of the classic Hard Country and many other poetry books, short story collections and memoirs

 

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 and forcing us to see their awful truths. These are essential poems of our moment.

   —Gerald McCarthy, author of Trouble Light, The Doorway in the Wall, other poetry volumes and a forthcoming memoir

 

 

Praise from India for What the Bird Tattoo Hides

Bohm's book is a poetry of witness at its best. His poems on India are completely free from the exoticizing and mystifying gaze of too many non-Indian writers.  India here is no wonderland of sages and snake charmers. This poet's mind is keyed to the sounds, colours, textures and feelings of everyday India. For him "seeing is prayer-like. And dangerous depending on whose eyes."

   —K.Satchidanandan, one of India's foremost poets, has published more than 20 poetry volumes and his work has been translated into 17 languages

 

Robert Bohm's Nightmares is his fourth poetry volume, along with two poetry chapbooks and a nonfiction work on the west's lingering colonial view of India. He was born in Queens, NY in 1943. As a draftee during Vietnam, he worked in an army hospital. Following his service, he earned an MFA in Creative Writing at UMass, Amherst, then taught for two years at Karnataka University in India and one year at Springfield College. Subsequently, he left academia and became a ghostwriter who specialized in authoring articles and reports on subjects related to the nation's ongoing debates over social-economic equity and military expansionism. Creative writing, however, remained his major commitment. His is married to Suman Kirloskar, a labor, women's and antiracism activist. They have two grown children and five grandchildren.