“St. Teresa of Ávila imagined within herself a multi-walled castle
and deep within that castle, like the most dangerous prisoner, God.
I imagine within myself a nothing insisting it’s everything
shrunk to the tip of an arrow, piercing.”
Read Emma Bolden’s poem, “I Consider What to Say When My Doctor Asks Me to Describe My Pain,” in Four Way Review.
I was heartbroken to hear that Southeast Missouri State University Press was closing down, but I’m ecstatic to announce that House Is an Enigma is now available from Bull City Press.
I’m so excited to be reading in the JackLeg Press Spring Poetry Series on Tuesday, March 26th at 7 p.m. ET. I’ll be reading with my dear friend Mamie Morgan, whose extraordinary collection, Everyone I’ve Danced With Is Dead, is out from JackLeg Press in March of 2024, and with Karen Rigby, whose beautiful book Fabulosa comes out with JackLeg in June of 2024, as well as the amazing Angie Estes, author of Parole. Click here for more information about JackLeg Press‘ reading series and to sign up for tickets on Eventbrite.
I’m proud to announce that I’ll be participating in a conversation as part of Sick Lit: An Endometriosis Literary Series at 1:00 EST/12:00 CST on Monday, December 11th, 2023. Sick Lit features conversations with five authors who’ve written about their experience with endometriosis. The Series is part of the In/Visible Endometriosis: Menstruation, Menopause and Narrative Medicine project at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Aging and Care at the University of Graz, Austria, and is sponsored by the Elisabeth-List-Fellowship-Program. Click here for more information and to RSVP for the Series!
“Theism,” originally published in the Sugar House Review, was featured on Verse Daily.
In this episode of The Lives of Writers podcast, guest host Erin Slaughter talks with Emma Bolden about leaving academia, editing for The Screen Door Review, writing across genre, asexuality, the South,The Tiger and the Cage, fractal form, embodied trauma, endometriosis, and more.
“Emma’s memoir, The Tiger and The Cage, exploring her decades-long rollercoaster with endometriosis was recently featured by the brilliant production company, Shondaland who describe her as a ‘compelling voice‘ and her book as: ‘an outstretched hand inviting us to accompany her through the most intimate and important experiences of her life, and women’s collective experiences.’”
— Sophie Jane Hardy, The Red School‘s Menstruality Podcast
Listen to Sophie Jane Hardy’s conversation with Emma Bolden on the Menstruality podcast from The Red School.
“Interweaving vivid glimpses of her life from puberty to present day with medical-history vignettes, [Bolden] examines the nature of her aggressive endometriosis, the dire side effects of prescribed treatments, and the roots of institutional misogyny in western medicine that still hamper diagnosis and treatment today.”
The Tiger and the Cage was recommended in a round-up of “Top 10 Medical Memoirs … by Patients” in The Guardian.
“Henry and William had a younger sister: Alice James was, like Bolden, besieged by mysterious pain throughout her life. She was at one point diagnosed with hysteria and urged to see Dr. Charcot in France. It seems she never went, though she and her doctors continued to perplex one another, and the experience took its inevitable mental toll: “I went down to the deep sea,” she wrote of one summer spent in depression; decades later, Bolden would remark that her experience felt, at times, “like drowning.” The symmetry is startling. If language cannot yield precision, perhaps it grants something else: across the decades, a furtive and hard-earned fellowship.”
— Zoe Hu, The Believer
Read “A Review of The Tiger and the Cage” by Zoe Hu in the comeback issue of The Believer.
“’Because we’ve been taught that our stories, that the blood and fear and vomit and pain inside our stories, are unspeakable,’ writes Emma Bolden, ‘some of us don’t speak about them at all.’ The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull Press)—her first work of prose following several poetry collections—is a resounding testament to the power of putting words to the experiences rendered opaque by society at large.”
— Emma R. Cohen, Hazlitt
Read “‘The Inexplicable Facets of Living in a Human Body’: An Interview with Emma Bolden,” Emma R. Cohen’s interview with Emma Bolden about The Tiger and the Cage, in Hazlitt.
“Emma Bolden and I were born in the same year, and we have the same name (she decided in high school to begin going by Emma). We’ve had similar educational and professional trajectories—BFA, MFA, tenure-track. So I read many of the scenes in her newest book with a wondrous and terrible recognition, having lived through my own version of big hair and big black smudged eyes like the girl on the cover of Hole’s Live Through This, lived through insomniac repeat playings of “Hey, Jupiter” on my Discman until I fell into a merciful sleep.”
(from Emily Van Duyne’s “Choosing to Bear Witness”)
Read “Choosing to Bear Witness: Writing the Story of a Body,” Emily Van Duyne’s essay in conversation with The Tiger and the Cage, at LitHub.
“Going through puberty as an asexual person often felt like I was playing a board game and everyone had the instructions but me. And going through adulthood as an asexual person—especially as an unmarried, childless woman in the Deep South—made me realize that my peers and I were actually playing entirely different games.”
Read Emma Bolden’s essay, “Finding My Asexual Identity in My Thirties,” in Catapult magazine.
“An intimate, eloquent personal history of survival and self-discovery . . . One of the most riveting and accessible accounts of the experience of pain you’ll read all year.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
Read Mary Elizabeth Williams’ interview with Emma Bolden, “‘I was 13 when doctors started telling me to have a baby’: A real-life tale of medical trauma,” on Salon.
“For any reader ever cast as the unreliable narrator of their own story, I suspect Bolden’s memoir will feel like fierce, validating balm.” — Wynter K. Miller, Electric Literature
Read Wynter K. Miller’s interview with Emma Bolden, “How Do You Escape If Your Body Is the Prison?“, on the Electric Literature website.
The Tiger and the Cage was featured in Poets and Writers magazine’s “Page One: Where New and Noteworthy Books Begin” for November/December 2022. To see the feature, click here. To hear me read a selection from The Tiger and the Cage, click here.
“Bolden’s memoir digs into the layers of sociocultural beliefs around menstruation, fertility, the expectations of women’s role to mate and procreate, and the indivisible links between sexuality, psychological security, desire, and self-awareness.” —Cat Woods, Shondaland
Read all of Cat Woods’ “Emma Bolden Rediscovers Herself Amid Her Battle With Endometriosis in The Tiger and the Cage” on the Shondaland website.
“[Bolden’s] lyrical descriptions and emotional honesty render this harrowing story hard to put down, and her critique of the medical establishment is both sharp and fair . . . A well-written, deeply researched, and searingly frank memoir about reproductive health.” —Kirkus Reviews
See what else Kirkus says about The Tiger and the Cage.
“Dark and riveting . . . [It] stings as much as it astounds.” — Publisher’s Weekly
See what Publisher’s Weekly had to say about The Tiger and the Cage, out in October 2022 from Soft Skull Press.
Read “The Exiled Speaks” and “girlblooded” in Interim.
“The Beautiful and Glorious,” from the Spring 2022 issue of the Southern Indiana Review, is featured as a Ruth Awad Poetry Pick on the SIR website.
Read “Convalescence” in Defunct Magazine.
Read “Coming of Age” in SWWIM Every Day.
Read “After the Anthropocene” in Just Place
I’ll be reading in celebration of Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology , edited by Julie E. Bloemeke and Dustin Brookshire, with A Hundred Pitchers of Honey over Zoom. Click this link to register!
I’ll be offering a craft talk at this year’s Red Clay Writers Conference, sponsored by the Georgia Writers Association and held at Kennesaw State University. More information soon!
Join me for a generative writing workshop about discovering ways to create through writers block. All you need is a poem that you’re stuck on! For more information and to RSVP, click here.
For more information, visit Greenlight Bookstore’s website here.
You can register for the event here.
To buy The Tiger and the Cage from Greenlight, click here.
Can’t make it to the launch but would still like a signed and personalized copy? You can order one from Thank You Books here. Just specify in the notes that you’d like a signed book.
In the inexcusable distance between
myself & God I built a house, I fenced
my taxes, I filed & folded, I mowed
my forgiveness into a fine fringe …from “Plenary Absolution”
I’m thrilled, honored, and humbled to say that I’ve got a new poem called “Plenary Absolution” in the latest issue of The Adroit Journal. You can see it — and hear me read it! — here. I hope you’ll take a look at the whole issue, which features tremendously powerful work by Emilia Phillips, Dana Levin, Jane Wong — actually, just read the whole issue. It’s an absolute beauty and I’m so proud to be a part of it.
PS: The title of this poem comes straight from my catechism classes at Catholic school (see, I did pay attention, Father Mullen!). Plenary absolution is an indulgence, which is a way to reduce punishment for one’s sins. A plenary indulgence removes all punishment necessary for the sin. I have a lot of thoughts about all of those ideas, and a lot of them are in this poem. Others are in poems soon to come — stay tuned.
House is An Enigma—when I say that title aloud, what emotions come up for you?
Pride. A lot of pride. The poems in this book are my most personal and most frightening, as they address the things that frighten me the most.
Stephen J. Furlong and I talked about House Is an Enigma, and you can read our conversation in Full Stop. I’m so grateful for Stephen’s perceptive, engaging questions, which led me to talk about Emily Dickinson, art school, x-rays, ovaries, brain dumps, House of Leaves, and Agnes Obel‘s Citizen of Glass (I can’t stop listening to it). Thank you to Full Stop for giving this interview a home.
PS: When you check out the interview and all the goodness that Full Stop has to offer, I hope you’ll also check out Stephen J. Furlong’s What Loss Taught Me from Nostrovia! Press.
If you’re in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and you’re looking for something to do tomorrow night, I have a suggestion. I’m totally stoked to be reading along with other poets and prose writers whose work has appeared in Ethel zine tomorrow, March 2nd, from 7:30 to 9:30 pm. Featured Ethels include Joanna Penn Cooper, Kate Van Dis, Lauren Hunter, Jessica Q. Stark, R. Bratten Weiss, and me. The reading takes place at The Carrack in Durham, where you’ll also be able to see their (incredible!) current exhibit, “It’s Complicated: A Project About Love and Intimacy.” There will be wine (good), snacks (even better), and books for sale and signing (BEST). One book you’ll definitely want to buy? Joanna Penn Cooper’s Ethel chapbook, When We Were Fearsome, pictured above. It’s one of my favorite books.
pain my initiation into a religion where the only principle of faith was
that this fault the frigid lack that unworthed me
was all my body was all my own
(excerpted from “Dry Needling”)
I’m proud to say that I’ve got three poems in the latest issue of the Screen Door Review. And I’m honored and humbled to say that the editors (to whom I am deeply grateful!) nominated my poem, “Dry Needling,” for a Pushcart Prize. It’s an important poem for me because it talks about an extremely invasive medical procedure many women (ace or otherwise) are given as a “last resort” when there are many, many other successful options for treatment. I wrote it as a reminder to myself and other women that it’s essential to speak openly with your doctors, especially when you’re uncomfortable with an exam or a course of treatment, and to seek other options and opinions.
When Boys for Pele came out, I was fifteen and brim-filled with anger and with the desire to be who I was instead of who I was told to be. The first time I listened to the CD, I was shocked and raw and bewildered and exhilarated and, most of all, irrevocably changed. In Amos’ music, I found the flipside of Southern womanhood, the Goddess of IDGAF who not only allowed herself to be open and angry and powerful but who proved that being a woman who’s open about anger is itself powerful. In her lyrics, I found the inexhaustible possibilities of language, which, I learned, didn’t have to be soft or easy or even entirely translatable. It just had to be real, authentic, individual — another kind of power.
(me talking about my queen Tori Amos in Glass: A Journal of Poetry)
I wrote a poem inspired by one of the most powerful (and maybe my favorite — maybe? — it’s impossible to choose) songs from Tori Amos‘ Boys for Pele, the album I’ve probably played more than any other (seriously — I’ve kept two copies of the CD in my car, just in case one got damaged, for as long as I’ve had a car). It’s called “In the Springtime of Her Voodoo” and I’m proud to say you can read it online in the latest issue of one of my favorite lit mags, Glass: A Journal of Poetry.
While you’re there, you can read more about why Tori Amos has been pretty much everything to me and my work as a writer since that life-changing day in 1994 when I heard the first gorgeous notes of Under the Pink. You can hear me read the poem, too, and, perhaps more importantly, you can see this totally awesome and completely badass live performance of “In the Springtime of His Voodoo” from MTV Unplugged, which, now that I’ve mentioned it, I have to go and watch again. Maybe like five times. In a row. At least.
If you’re in the great greater Birmingham area, I hope you’ll come out to Desert Island Supply Company for what promises to be one helluva night. I’ll be reading from my new collection, House Is an Enigma — with some surprise new poems, probably about finishing schools, Jordan Catalano, and/or Tori Amos songs. I’m thrilled-beyond-thrilled to be joined on the stage under the squid by Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest, and Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Wild Milk and The Babies (one of my all-time favorite books). I am a HUGE fan of both of their work, so you’ll get to see me nerding out/being totally awkward (well, more awkward than usual, if that’s possible?). Thankfully, The Whiskey Thief will be there to supply us all with cocktails they’ve created. I’m so looking forward to this one and so incredibly grateful to a.) be reading in my home city and b.) be reading with such incredible writers c.) with the incredible people of DISCO, who I greatly admire.
Alabama peeps, head downtown on Thursday night — y’all don’t want to miss this one!
I’m honored to have my poem, “Incendiary Devices,” appear in the Iron Horse Literary Review‘s NewsFlash series.
The first line — “A bomb has a signature” — comes from a Rachel Maddow Show segment title, which itself came from a quote from fellow Alabamian Joyce Vance. Vance is a former US Attorney, my personal hero, and the daughter-in-law of Judge Robert S. Vance, who was assassinated by a mail bomb in 1989.
Joyce Vance also worked on the investigation into the bombing of a Birmingham abortion clinic. I was 17 and in high school 1.7 miles away when the clinic was bombed. We circled around a TV set in my AP Government classroom, completely terrified. The clinic offered a range of women’s healthcare, including free pregnancy tests in the days before disposable drugstore tests. In fact, it’s the place where my mom found out she was pregnant with me.
When I saw Joyce Vance talk about the bombing on the Rachel Maddow Show, that terrifying day came back to me. I was struck by the endless, circular nature of human cruelty, how hatred begets violence and grief, and also how the forces of goodness can find a way to rise even from ashes.