Gale Batchelder is an exciting voice in contemporary poetry. In many ways, her work reads as an extension of a rich tradition of Modernist feminist writers, who responded through poetic craft to the male philosophers of their particular historical moment. Like H.D.’s poetic revisions of Freud, Marianne Moore’s artistic deconstructions of William James, and Gertrude Stein’s artistic dialogue with Bergson, Batchelder challenges, through form and technique, some of the most basic foundations of the intellectual tradition we’ve inherited. What’s more, her work uses poetic craft to make observations about the nature of thought, affect, and wonder that are rarely possible in the academic language that is typically the chosen vehicle for philosophy and theory. Here, in this gorgeous folio, we find a new tradition, echoing in bright air.
Gale Batchelder lives in Cambridge. Her work has been published in the poetry anthologies New Smoke (2009) and Triumph of Poverty (2011), in White Whale Review,Amethyst Arsenic, SpoKe4, and in Colorado Review. She is the co-author of a poetry collaboration, Chalk Song, which is available from Lily Poetry Review Books.