Books AND CHAPBOOKS
Consider the Rooster
Nightboat Books
September 10, 2024 | 124 pages
A Letras Latinas “Most Anticipated Book of 2024,” Consider the Rooster serves as an ode to a rooster's crow, a catalyst for awakening, both literally and figuratively.
Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic, the aftermath of George Floyd's murder by police, and the resulting upsurge in reactionary right-wing militia violence, a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author's pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation. An ecological consciousness embedded in these verses invites readers to acknowledge their place in a web of relations. Oliver Baez Bendorf's voice resounds through liminal spaces, at dusk and dawn, across personal meditations and wider cultural awakenings to form a collection overflowing with freedom, rebellion, mischief, and song.
Advantages of Being Evergreen
Winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Book Prize
CSU Poetry Center | 2019 | ISBN 978-1-880834-00-8 | 70 pages
Purchase: IndieBound / Bookshop / CSU Poetry Center
“Equal part prayer and potion and survival guide, Oliver Baez Bendorf’s remarkable Advantages of Being Evergreen is an essential book for our time and for all time. With rigorous compassion and great formal dexterity Bendorf imagines a new world for all of our animal selves in which we are truly seen and truly safe. At the same time these are poems that never shy from the shocking violence and cruelty of this world. I don’t know when I’ve read a book that is so gentle and ferocious at the same time. Over and over again people come together to make their individual and communal body whole, knowing all the while that so much of the world seeks to wreck even the simplest kinds of safety. Baez Bendorf is making a future grammar for the moment all of our vessels are free and held. I am living for the world these poems anticipate. And I’m so happy to be held by them in the times that keep coming on this endless road to safety. This is a book of the earth’s abiding wonder. And the body’s unbreakable ability to bloom.”
– Gabrielle Calvocoressi
It is in your hands, now just open it, anywhere, it is so good! A book of poems to have in our days, a book shifting our views, our love, our faith in poetry and in life. Oliver Baez Bendorf returns poetry to its origins of magic, his feet walking on many roads to bring us this book. Dear witch-poet Oliver, may you be held as you want by a strong thing that “chooses mercy.”
—CAConrad
This book… offers a topography of the body—each poem, a dropped pin, locating across a broad intricate landscape: memory, hunger, tenderness, grief, and fear. To read these poems is to trust the momentum of tributaries or the distance traveled when the trail is full of switchbacks. This work is an exercise of faith.
—Amaud Jamaul Johnson
Written from and with death, the poems in Advantages of Being Evergreen offer elegies; they utter prayers that ask our dead to stay; they come as breath constrained and animated by a form that narrates an excess of natures, an excess of rivers that interrupt this book as the poet ponders the impossible question of what it means to be home. Here the body is a shared condition. The body is language. It changes. It resists. It mourns. It reincarnates with the “teeth of our dead around our neck.”
– Daniel Borzutzky
The Spectral Wilderness
Winner of the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize
Kent State University Press | 2015 | ISBN 9781606352113 | 88 pages
Purchase: IndieBound / Bookshop / Barnes & Noble
In poem after poem he builds and rebuilds a body, a story, a desire that are at once familiar and strange, capable of brightness like any headlight but also capable of losing that light in their brokenness which makes us love them even more.
—Natalie Diaz
What gorgeous and ravenous rackets Oliver Bendorf’s poems are made of; what a yearning and beautiful heart. ‘Lift a geode from the ground and crack me open,’ he writes, which is more or less what these poems do for me: break me open to what might sparkle and blaze, what might glisten and burn inside.
—Ross Gay
The Gospel According to X
Selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series
Seven Kitchens Press | 2019 | ISBN 978-1-949333-57-2 | 25 pages
Purchase: Seven Kitchens Press
Printed in a limited edition of 100
Features two alternate cover designs