The Animal Is Chemical
Buy it from Four Way Books | Amazon
“The Animal Is Chemical is a book about the body and the mind—their response to illness and their rejection of, or dependence on, all we do to medicate what we cannot bear to feel. But it also seems to me an extended ars poetica that questions—and prays for!—poetry’s ability to heal: “The old wound is speaking/again through my back,//carving its blood alphabet.” Hadara Bar-Nadav organizes terror through a language so precise that every line proves how beauty can be wrought from pain.”
–Jericho Brown, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Academy of American Poets:
“Dress (Aurora Borealis),” “Sun,” “Zombie,” “The Brilliant Fragments,” and “Lullaby (with Exit Sign).”
AGNI:
“Blur” and “Fable of Flesh”
The Believer:
“Biopsy in Pink”
Crazyhorse:
“Ligature” and “Thumb”
Poetry:
“The Singing Pills”
“Loop in Dirt and Gold”
Poetry Society of America:
“Suicide Bombings and Poetry: On the Writing of ‘Blur’”
POOL:
“Ample as the Eye,” “Dust Is the Only Secret,” “Meet Me Breathless,” and “Ruin Is Formal”
TriQuarterly:
“A Brittle Heaven,” “How Soft This Prison Is” and “What Care the Dead for Day”
Verse Daily:
“My Wife in All Things” and “Lullaby (with Exit Sign)”
The New Nudity
The New Nudity gives voice to the souls of objects. In these dark, spoken still lives, personification becomes a kind of conjuring, a mystical art rife with nuance. A swan is “death dressed/in snow.” A door admits, “If you look under my skirt, you’ll see/the darkness of another world.” The spine is a “bone ruffle.” Bar-Nadav’s powers of description are prodigious and spooky. In images as disquieting and reverberant as ancient riddles, Bar-Nadav marries the monstrous and the illuminating, the solid and the ethereal, reflecting harrowing and beautiful facets of our dissolving world.
—Amy Gerstler
Hadara Bar-Nadav studies everyday objects and builds figurative assemblages that are unbearably beautiful and believable. Like a contemporary Francis Ponge (“The Voice of Things”), she presents a tour de force on materiality—door, ladder, sugar, swan, oven, bridge, and lung, for a sampling. Using the poetic sleight-of-hand of harrowingly brief lines, she exponentially explodes the simplest object into myth and history. Her stripped down images—is this the new nudity she refers to?—create uncommonly explosive, intense poems.
—Jane Miller
Reading for Four Way Books, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Kansas City, Missouri (February 2024).
Reading for Laurel Review, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Kansas City, Missouri (February 2024).
Reading for Saturnalia Books, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Kansas City, Missouri (February 2024).
Reading for Yetzirah, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Kansas City, Missouri (February 2024).
Reading for Adroit Journal (January 2024).
Reading in collaboration with Peregrine Honig’s art show Player, Studios Inc, Kansas City, Missouri (December 2023).
Reading for A Common Sense Reading Series, Kansas City Arts Institute, Kansas City, Missouri (September 2023).
Reading for 32 Poems, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Seattle, Washington (March 2023).
Larksong Reading Series, Lincoln, Nebraska (December 2022).
Saturnalia Anthology Book Launch for Lords of Misrule (December 2022).
Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois (November 2022).
Unbound Book Festival, Columbia, Missouri (April 2022).
YMCA of Central New York, Downtown Writer’s Center, Syracuse, New York (November 2021).
Midwest Poet’s Series, Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri (September 2021).
Sunday Reading Series, Hungry Brain, Chicago, Illinois (July 2021).
Reading for Pleiades, Missouri Literary Magazines’ Celebration, Kansas City, Missouri (March 2021)
Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska (March 2021).
University of Nebraska-Omaha, Omaha, Nebraska (February 2021).
University of South Alabama, Mobile, Alabama (February 2021).
Reading for the American Poetry Review, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, San Antonio, Texas (March 2020).
Reading for Copper Nickel, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, San Antonio, Texas (March 2020).
Reading for The Florida Review, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, San Antonio, Texas (March 2020).
City Lit Books, Chicago, Illinois (August 2019).
Reading for Saturnalia Books, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Portland, Oregon (March 2019).
Brooklyn Poets Reading Series, Brooklyn, New York (November 2018).
Same Page Reading Series, KGB Bar, New York, New York (November 2018).
Living Writer’s Series, William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey (November 2018).
University of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia, Missouri (October 2018).
Reading for The Bear Review, Kansas City, Missouri (June 2018).
Unbound Book Festival, Columbia, Missouri (April 2018).
College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina (April 2018).
San Diego State University, San Diego, California (February 2018).
Southwestern College, Chula Vista, California (February 2018).
Poetry Flash Series, Moe’s Books, Berkeley, California (February 2018).
University of San Francisco, San Francisco, California (February 2018).
The Writer’s Place, Kansas City, Missouri (November 2017).
City Lit Books, Chicago, Illinois (November 2017).
Reading for Quarterly West, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (off-site event), Washington, D.C. (February 2017).
10th Annual Shaindy Rudoff Memorial Evening and International Creative Writing Conference, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel (May 2016).
Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri (April 2016).
Reading for Green Mountains Review, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (off-site event), Los Angeles, California (April 2016).
Reading for Memorious, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (off-site event), Los Angeles, California (April 2016).
Reading for Saturnalia Books, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (off-site event), Los Angeles, California (April 2016).
Reading for Tupelo Press, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference (off-site event), Los Angeles, California (April 2016).
Berl’s Poetry Book Shop, New York, New York (March 2016).
The Bowery Ballroom, New York, New York (March 2016).
Chicago Poetry Center, Chicago, Illinois (October 2015).
Lewis University, Romeoville, Illinois (October 2015).
Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Farmington, Connecticut (June 2015).
Saturnalia Books, Association of Writer’s and Writing Programs Conference, Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 2015).
University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, Missouri (February 2015).
Women in the World: A Poetry Reading Celebrating International Women’s Day, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, Missouri (March 2014).
The Observable Reading Series, St. Louis Poetry Center, St. Louis, Missouri (February 2014).
The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (May 2013).
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (May 2013).
California State University-Fresno, Fresno, California (April 2013).
Israeli and Iranian Poets Reading, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Boston, Massachusetts (March 2013).
New Issues Press Reading, Boston Public Library, off-site event during the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Boston, Massachusetts (March 2013).
Saturnalia Books Reading, Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference, Boston, Massachusetts (March 2013).
The Loft, Minneapolis, Minnesota (February 2013).
A Common Sense Reading Series, Cara and Cabezas Contemporary Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri (October 2012).
Poet-in-Residence, Emporia State College, Emporia, Kansas (March 2012).
Reading for Route 66, The Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Conference, The Buzz Café, Chicago, Illinois (March 2012).
Younger American Poets Reading Series, Des Moines, Iowa (November 2011).
Jewish Cultural Event, The Writer’s Place, Kansas City, Missouri (May 2011).
Kalamazoo Book Arts Center, Kalamazoo, Michigan (March 2011).
Dodge Poetry Festival, Newark, New Jersey (October 2010).
The New Nudity
The New Nudity gives voice to the souls of objects. In these dark, spoken still lives, personification becomes a kind of conjuring, a mystical art rife with nuance. A swan is “death dressed/in snow.” A door admits, “If you look under my skirt, you’ll see/the darkness of another world.” The spine is a “bone ruffle.” Bar-Nadav’s powers of description are prodigious and spooky. In images as disquieting and reverberant as ancient riddles, Bar-Nadav marries the monstrous and the illuminating, the solid and the ethereal, reflecting harrowing and beautiful facets of our dissolving world.
—Amy Gerstler
Hadara Bar-Nadav studies everyday objects and builds figurative assemblages that are unbearably beautiful and believable. Like a contemporary Francis Ponge (“The Voice of Things”), she presents a tour de force on materiality—door, ladder, sugar, swan, oven, bridge, and lung, for a sampling. Using the poetic sleight-of-hand of harrowingly brief lines, she exponentially explodes the simplest object into myth and history. Her stripped down images—is this the new nudity she refers to?—create uncommonly explosive, intense poems.
—Jane Miller
Fountain and Furnace
Awarded the Sunken Garden Poetry Chapbook Award
“The hyper-focused intimacy of the exquisite poems in Fountain and Furnace shapeshift and plumb beautifully deep. The simple objects of Bar-Nadav’s titles become layered with vivid shadows and sad strangeness.… exactness charges the invisible—the marvelous strata underneath the outward—with fierceness and loss and sensuality.”
— Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book and Happy: A Memoir
“A bracing pruning of form down to its minimalist essence, a sharp knife trimming away dead branches. The point of view is always shifting, sometimes speaking as the object, sometimes to the object, and sometimes transubstantiating, perhaps to something like the voice of a god.”
— Peter Stitt, author of The Perfect Life and judge for the Sunken Garden Poetry Award
Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
Dazzling, sorrowful, part elegy, part call and response between Bar-Nadav and Emily Dickinson, (“We…walked into the world across a woman’s lips”), this grand third book is a scrupulously crafted, brilliantly conceived sequence of poems. An essential and ravishing work.
—Lynn Emanuel
In four sequences of sonically brilliant poems, Bar-Nadav meditates on the mortality of parents, the betrayal of the flesh, our partial salvation through artistic creation, and the many ways the dead and passing continue to live on in our perceptions of the world. Emily Dickinson’s voids and echo chambers inhabit this book—phrases from her poems are strung like silver threads through it—but these musically astonishing, restless, often terrifying poems are entirely Bar-Nadav’s. “To be alive is to be Haunted; to be dead is to haunt,” she writes. “Who calls your name? We do. Who speaks from your mouth? We do. Father, mother, daughter, we do. A seat for you at our table.” This is an invigorating, deeply moving book by one of the truly memorable poets of my generation.
—Kevin Prufer
The Frame Called Ruin
Terse and fiery terms, strong emotions, and analogies from the visual arts dominate this often erotic, sometimes brilliant second collection from Bar-Nadav….
—Publishers Weekly
In Hadara Bar-Nadav’s poetry, ruin gives birth to blossoms, and broken glass gives rise to temples of a thousand shining windows. In the presence of death, under the aegis of catastrophe, everything comes alive. This is not merely the art of affirmation; this is the poetry of fierce abandonment to Being. In The Frame Called Ruin, our souls are shown, thank God, to be both weightless and indestructible: “Everything unbuttons and we/forget about war.” Bar-Nadav has made a book of miracles.
—Donald Revell
Space is at the center of this gorgeously sculpted book, whether it’s the torn spaces left behind by war or the polished spaces of contemporary architecture or the bottomless rectangles of Rothko canvases. Bar-Nadav approaches them all with an ekphrastic eye, negotiating them through agile juxtapositions and a balance of sharp clarity and evocative ambiguity. Each poem is a gem.
—Cole Swensen
A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight
With a scrupulous and often terrifying sensuousness that invokes butchery and witchery, and with smooth and feverish music, Hadara Bar-Nadav creates a world of surreal excitement. “Every voice, a hiss/ with my name inside// and God in the rafters / hissing too.” Enter here, but walk with care.
—Alicia Ostriker
Hadara Bar-Nadav’s smart, prize-winning poems do the hard work of revising our stories. The poems see clearly atrocities both domestic and international and reproduce them in brilliant chips of what would be color if it were paint. This poet’s tongue cracks open language to project fractured images from our intellectual systems – architecture, mathematics, ekphrasis, even the reduction of body to experience. A brave, fierce, and brilliant first book.
—Hilda Raz
…Hadara Bar-Nadav is a poet to keep an eye on. She is a firecracker mind with a wholly original voice. Her next few books should be stunners
—Rattle
Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
Awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize
Finalist for the Rilke Prize
Dazzling, sorrowful, part elegy, part call and response between Bar-Nadav and Emily Dickinson, (“We…walked into the world across a woman’s lips”), this grand third book is a scrupulously crafted, brilliantly conceived sequence of poems. An essential and ravishing work.
—Lynn Emanuel
In four sequences of sonically brilliant poems, Bar-Nadav meditates on the mortality of parents, the betrayal of the flesh, our partial salvation through artistic creation, and the many ways the dead and passing continue to live on in our perceptions of the world. Emily Dickinson’s voids and echo chambers inhabit this book—phrases from her poems are strung like silver threads through it—but these musically astonishing, restless, often terrifying poems are entirely Bar-Nadav’s. “To be alive is to be Haunted; to be dead is to haunt,” she writes. “Who calls your name? We do. Who speaks from your mouth? We do. Father, mother, daughter, we do. A seat for you at our table.” This is an invigorating, deeply moving book by one of the truly memorable poets of my generation.
—Kevin Prufer
The Frame Called Ruin
Buy it from University of Chicago Press | Amazon
Awarded Runner Up/Editor’s Selection for the Green Rose Prize
In Hadara Bar-Nadav’s poetry, ruin gives birth to blossoms, and broken glass gives rise to temples of a thousand shining windows. In the presence of death, under the aegis of catastrophe, everything comes alive. This is not merely the art of affirmation; this is the poetry of fierce abandonment to Being. In The Frame Called Ruin, our souls are shown, thank God, to be both weightless and indestructible: “Everything unbuttons and we/forget about war.” Bar-Nadav has made a book of miracles.
—Donald Revell
Terse and fiery terms, strong emotions, and analogies from the visual arts dominate this often erotic, sometimes brilliant second collection from Bar-Nadav .
–Publishers Weekly
A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight
Buy it from Amazon
Awarded the Margie First Book Prize
With a scrupulous and often terrifying sensuousness that invokes butchery and witchery, and with smooth and feverish music, Hadara Bar-Nadav creates a world of surreal excitement. “Every voice, a hiss/ with my name inside// and God in the rafters / hissing too.” Enter here, but walk with care.
—Alicia Ostriker
For readings, speaking engagements, and manuscript consultations, contact Hadara at barnadavh@umkc.edu.
All other inquiries can be made via my publicist at Four Way Books: publicity@fourwaybooks.com.
Hadara Bar-Nadav is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Poetry Foundation fellowship, and other honors. Her newest book The Animal Is Chemical (Four Way Books, 2024), was awarded the Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jericho Brown. Her other books include The New Nudity; Lullaby (with Exit Sign), awarded the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize and a finalist for the Rilke Prize; The Frame Called Ruin, Editor’s Selection for the Green Rose Prize; and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight, awarded the Margie Book Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Fountain and Furnace, awarded the Sunken Garden Prize, and Show Me Yours, awarded the Midwest Poets Series Prize. In addition, she is co-author with Michelle Boisseau of the best-selling textbook Writing Poems, 8th ed. Individual poems appear in the American Poetry Review, The Believer, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. Hadara is currently Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
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