AMERICAN SELFIE

Barrow Street Press, 2019

“In this beautifully balanced, elegiac book Curtis Bauer revisits the American sublime and restores to us, in our battered, bewildered moment, its clarity and dignity and honor. These are poems of an enduring human accuracy and a restrained, muted joy.”
—Vijay Seshadri

“Bauer’s lens looks back on personal history, as well our collective need to be seen as a means of being, making American Selfie self-reflection at its lyrical best. Bauer fearlessly walks to the borders then crosses them. Everything he touches touches us, and is given space here… grackles, sidewalks, the constancy of dogs, alleys and horizons, tumbleweeds, prickly pears, the insistence of passion where dust and its implication of endings inundate everything. Bauer ‘is on a road without a name’… and we want to walk it with him.”
—Vievee Francis