Pink: Poems

By Sylvie Baumgartel

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Feb 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9780374601218

Sylvie Baumgartel

Sylvie Baumgartel is the author of Song of Songs (FSG, 2019). Her poems have appeared in The Financial Times, The Paris Review, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, Subtropics, Raritan, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, the PEN Poetry series, and The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from “The Paris Review." She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Book preview

THE WASHING

Mothers & daughters have secrets.

I knead the delicates, she needs the secrets.

We don’t separate the lights from the darks.

The pink lines bleed into the white lies.

When they cleaned the Sistine Chapel,

The fig leaves were removed

To expose the original genitals.

But the eyes’ dark pupils were lost.

CUM CLAVE

The night sky on the vaulted

Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Was hacked off star by gold star

For Michelangelo to make the

World from scratch.

I think I remember a serene birth.

My pink body & the blue pulsing rope

Cut by a masked man.

My mother’s long thighs

Painted in blood & water as

My father’s blue eyes looked first

Into the universe of my mouth.

I can’t see the stop-motion

Lions hunting in the Lascaux cave.

They are being saved

From my breath;

They are being preserved

For future bodies to destroy.

But I want to breathe on those

Lions & watch them run.

It’s my skin, my sweat & my