During Covid, 16 poems from Scorpio were made into videos with videographer Kezi Ban. This experiment brought novel results.
Bett Williams elaborates at Lucid News : “My reflexive judging is uncontrollable, then I’m drawn in quickly by the self-anointed faith of this goddess saturated in the archetypal sludge of marketing imagery, that also happens to be beautiful, that also contains magical language…Katy’s beauty in word and persona manages to be both classical, earnest and ridiculous all at once. These are survival poems that clearly demand a new form, that of video, to come alive in. Pleasure and embodiment guide the way here. It’s an inspiring ethic I can get behind when strategizing a new and different approach.”
Watch Scorpio Poems (The Videos) Here.
“Poems sear in their straightforward simplicity…Bohinc delivers an astute, witty, feminist collection.” - Publishers Weekly
“The feeling of having just encountered new possibilities for lyric poetry.” -Tom Snarsky
“Bohinc's engagement with the political, the historical, and the scientific in Scorpio bubbles to a roiling boil but doesn't spill over, proving that poetry can be at once visceral and factual, earthy and Einsteinian, metaphysical and mathematical.” - American Book Review
“LAVARTUS PRODEO [I go forward bewitched]” - Joshua Corey
“It’s all so surreal and challenges my assumptions of the poetic line in the best and, frankly, funniest way.” - Fence Digital
Because I go to so many / bullshit meetings all day long, writes Katy Bohinc, I want / a literary song. This is a book of love songs and songs of despair. It takes place in bad times like these. True to the title, many of Scorpio's best poems are also its scariest.
-- Ariana Reines
Scorpio comes on fast, like a speeding star sent out from a galaxy that is both very far away and deeply here on earth, close with real things. In these poems, Bohinc relentlessly describes in pulsing and various tones a reality where loneliness is impossible and the mistakes of our age can be corrected with an instinctual elixir, where the pressures of society can be alleviated with a sweet internal and holy rage. This book is the essence of poetry: it's necessary, everchanging, and ferocious.
-- Dorothea Lasky
Scorpios remember pain and ache for a line break. They are harsh enough on themselves to think they are caged personas that mimic what they most pity. Bohinc realizes words are mere lies, yet she maneuvers them hauntingly to fight the demons of the night in order to retrieve a vocabulary for poems as intense and as necessary as water and communism.
-- Maged Zaher