Lost in the Bardo

I don't know of another book of poetry that portrays middle age with the blend of humor and deep emotion that distinguishes Carloynn Kingyens' Lost in the Bardo. In vivid high res, these poems combine spiky wit and acute observation with the vulnerable openness of a voice "forever searching." Contemporary poetry is larger and more alive for this superb collection.

-Peter Campion, author, One Summer Evening at the Falls, El Dorado, and Other People

Unembellished and heart-searing, Carolynn Kingyens' Lost in the Bardo forms a calendar of regrets for the stun called middle age; for the feeling of already having lived all these violences, invisibilities, in-betweennesses, frantic beliefs and unknowabilities, all these hopes of hope; for how some people say you can move beyond grief's blast furnace in a predictable plot arc, leave it behind as if you were walking out of a bad blockbuster, but how it really just keeps crowding you up at the very moments you think you might, just might, finally have found something like release.

-Lance Olsen, author, Absolute Away, Always Crashing in the Same Car, and My Red Heaven

In Carolynn Kingyens' third book of poetry, Lost in the Bardo, she captures the state of transition, the limbo - as we reluctantly shed our younger selves to the vagaries of middle age and beyond. There is a wonderful yin and yang going on here between holding on and letting go. Kingyens puts a sharp, unrelenting focus on the institution of marriage, spirituality, the flush body and the sallow one, and the everlasting search for connection and love.

-Doug Holder, former Co-President, New England Poetry Club and Founder, Ibbetson Street Press